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About VGS

VGS is building the trust infrastructure for a new era of commerce. As commerce becomes agentic, payments are increasing dramatically in volume, speed, and complexity, and the companies driving that shift need a foundation they can fully trust.

That's where VGS comes in. We're the world's leader in payment tokenization, trusted by the most innovative AI and Fortune 500 companies, merchants, banks, and fintechs to power modern payments and agentic commerce. We store more than 9 billion tokens and process more than 10 billion monthly interactions, touching a third of all e-commerce. That scale isn't incidental. It's why leading companies embed our universal token vault and credential management platform directly into their stack, taming the complexity of payment data so they can move faster.

Come build the platform that enables modern payments for the world's largest companies. We're helping businesses unlock new possibilities in an industry that never stops moving. And that takes exceptional people.

Trusted Engineering That Matters

Engineering at VGS

VGS is building the platform powering agentic commerce and global payments infrastructure. VGS Engineering is the pillar that supports that vision. We create a platform that is an indispensable, ubiquitous component of our partners' payments and security infrastructure. We build and operate high-scale, reliable, and resilient systems that manage mission-critical payment data across the globe. We don't just participate in the payments ecosystem; we power it.

Our Environment & Culture

Modern Tooling as Leverage

We value speed and impact. To ensure nothing slows you down, we arm you with a highly consistent modern stack (e.g. AWS, Kubernetes, Java, TypeScript, Python) and world-class AI-augmented SDLC tooling. We strip away the friction so you can focus on the problems that demand creativity and judgment.

Ownership of Outcomes

Scaling global payments infrastructure requires individuals who take personal ownership of outcomes from day one. We look for builders who combine high agency with deep strategic alignment; channeling their urgency and relentless iteration into what matters most.

Mission-Critical Accountability

We power payments infrastructure for global market leaders, making system trust and integrity our core deliverable. We don't treat compliance (PCI, SOC2, ISO27001), security patching, and platform maintenance as administrative overhead—we engineer them with first-class product discipline. In payments infrastructure, reliability is not background work, it’s part of what customers buy.

Learn More

See how our engineering practices drive trust and innovation in our official blog and our reliability practices.

About the Role

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will be a key contributor and technical practitioner on our Payments Acceptance team. In this role, you will help design, scale, and fortify global, high-throughput payment systems designed to execute mission-critical transactions with zero downtime. You will take direct ownership of expanding our high-impact Value-Added Services (VAS) including Network Tokens, Account Updater, 3DS, and Account Validation.

Working hand-in-hand with Tech Leads, Product Management, and adjacent platform teams, you will execute complex initiatives and uphold enterprise reliability standards. Rather than executing against rigid task lists or waiting for top-down instructions, you will bring high agency to your daily work, pioneering AI-native engineering methodologies and integrating agentic workflows across the entire SDLC. We are looking for hands-on product-minded builders who refuse to settle for the status quo, hate manual friction, and take immense pride in solving complex distributed systems challenges at 10,000+ TPS with exceptional quality, scalability, reliability, and security.

What You'll Do

Build Mission-Critical Payments Services

Design, build, and optimize high-availability, low-latency, and resilient Java microservices powering our core Payments Acceptance platform and Value-Added Services.

Drive AI-Native Engineering

Actively integrate AI-augmented development tools and agentic workflows into your daily SDLC—from rapid prototyping and automated code generation to comprehensive test suite creation and complex refactoring to eliminate friction and multiply delivery velocity.

Drive Resiliency & Automation

Eliminate manual toil by building automated, self-healing services using GitOps, modern CI/CD pipelines, and robust Infrastructure-as-Code practices.

Deep Observability & Operations

Configure and maintain telemetry tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) to proactively spot bottlenecks. You will participate in on-call rotations and lead blameless post-mortems to continuously harden system reliability.

Enable Engineering Velocity

Partner with cross-functional teams to build and adopt "Golden Paths" that streamline software delivery. Mentor mid-level and junior engineers while championing high code quality and testing standards.

Customer & Product Impact

Own service functionality end-to-end ensuring security, performance, and low latency for external customer traffic while supporting smooth platform adoption internally.

What You Bring

Ownership at Scale

5+ years of software engineering experience taking personal ownership of features in complex, high-throughput distributed systems within mission-critical environments.

Java & Microservices Expertise

Proficiency in Java and modern frameworks (Spring/Spring Boot), with a strong command of REST API design, distributed architecture, and microservices design patterns.

Data & Messaging Systems

Hands-on experience with event-driven architectures, messaging systems (Kafka, SQS), and relational database tuning and performance optimization.

Cloud-Native & Containers

Solid hands-on experience with containerized delivery paradigms (Docker, Kubernetes/EKS) and public cloud ecosystems, preferably AWS.

Security & Compliance Foundations

Solid understanding of secure coding practices, API security, and operating within regulated compliance frameworks (PCI-DSS, SOC2).

Growth Mindset & High Agency

You're curious; you thrive at acquiring the context and asking questions needed to solve meaningful problems without needing every task spelled out. You have an innate drive to experiment, automate away repetitive tasks, and acquire whatever missing context is needed to solve complex technical challenges end-to-end.

Nice to Have

Experience with tokenization, payment processing, or security products

BA/BS degree

A knack for out-of-the-box thinking that thrives in a fast-paced startup environment

Direct domain experience in payments (Network Tokens, Account Updater, or 3DS).

Hands-on experience leveraging AI developer tools, or agentic automation in day-to-day engineering workflows.

Proven track record of database performance tuning or query troubleshooting in high-concurrency production environments.

$140,000 - $230,000 a year

How We Work

At VGS, we embrace a remote-first philosophy because we believe flexibility leads to great work and a healthy work-life balance. That said, if you live within 30 miles of one of our office locations, you'll be on a hybrid schedule with some in-person time, because we know there's real value in coming together.

We're not about being in the office every day. We are about connection, collaboration, and the energy that comes from a great brainstorm, a team lunch, or celebrating a big win in person.

Our Benefits

Financial and retirement

Competitive salary

401(k) with a 4% match and immediate vesting (applies to US only)

Early equity

Internet stipend

Learning stipend

Office set-up stipend (applies to US only)

Health and Wellness

Insurance (medical, dental, and vision)

HSA/FSA options

Life and disability insurance

Pet insurance

Vacation and time off

Flexible PTO

Paid national holidays

Global parental leave program

Professional Development

Promote from within

Lunch and learns

Team events and summits

Office life and perks

Remote and hybrid opportunities

Flexible working hours

Weekly office lunches

Employee discount platform

Equal Opportunity

We consider all applicants without regard to race, color, national origin, sex, age, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, marital status, physical or mental disability, or other protected classes under all applicable local, state, and federal laws and ordinances (AA/EOE/W/M/Vet/Disabled).

Qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records will be considered for this position in accordance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.

Where We're Hiring

We are currently hiring in the following locations

Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Ontario (Canada), Alberta (Canada), and British Columbia (Canada).

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A Note on Our Hiring Process

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.