Staff Engineer

Staff Engineer

Shift4 (NYSE: FOUR) is boldly redefining commerce by simplifying complex payments ecosystems across the world. As the leader in commerce-enabling technology, Shift4 powers billions of transactions annually for hundreds of thousands of businesses in virtually every industry.

We're looking for an experienced and driven Staff Engineer to join our technology leadership team. In this role, you'll lead key cross-organizational initiatives, provide technical guidance, and shape engineering practices that power our scalable, business-critical systems in the online transactions and payments space.

You'll play a pivotal role in leading technical transformation, supporting developers, and elevating the platform with a long-term view — all while staying hands-on where it matters.

Responsibilities:

Be a Technical Thought Leader

• Champion and lead strategic initiatives across R&D: platform modernization, performance at scale, developer experience, and major migrations
• Serve as a trusted technical advisor, offering design reviews, setting architectural standards, and guiding engineers through complex challenges
• Own and evolve shared libraries and frameworks that empower teams and promote engineering consistency

Explore, Prove, Evolve

• Lead PoCs and evaluate innovative technologies (like Aerospike or AI developer tools) to drive breakthroughs in performance, scalability, and maintainability
• Help Shift4 stay ahead of the curve by proactively identifying and addressing tech debt or architectural limitations

Elevate Tooling, DevOps, and Quality

• Partner with TechOps and platform teams to enhance CI/CD (GitLab pipelines), observability, and internal tooling
• Define and promote best practices around code quality, static analysis, and release automation to ensure excellence at every commit

Mentor, Inspire, Influence

• Provide matrix-style leadership across engineering squads, mentoring engineers, guiding technical decisions, and raising the bar for what "great" looks like
• Foster a culture of shared ownership, curiosity, and cross-team collaboration
• Support agile practices that enable autonomy, continuous delivery, and long-term quality

Requirements:

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience with Java and Spring (Spring Boot) – required.
• Proven track record in technical leadership roles, guiding architectural decisions, and driving change across teams.
• Experience building and maintaining high-performance, distributed systems in production.
• Deep understanding of DevOps workflows, deployment pipelines, and platform tooling.
• Familiarity with technologies like RabbitMQ, Hazelcast, Aerospike – an advantage.
• Strong interpersonal skills – able to influence, guide, and inspire technical teams.
• Comfortable balancing strategic vision with hands-on technical execution.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and do not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, sex, age, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, status as a veteran, and basis of disability or any other federal, state or local protected class.