Staff Software Engineer, Revenue Platform

Metropolis Metropolis · Vertical AI · Los Angeles, CA +5 · Application Development

Staff Software Engineer for Metropolis's Revenue Platform team, focusing on billing, payments, and invoicing infrastructure. The role involves owning technical direction, designing resilient payment processing, building monitoring and reporting, and partnering with finance and operations to solve complex revenue challenges. Requires strong systems thinking for financial correctness and experience with payment gateways and financial data.

What you'd actually do

  1. Own the technical architecture and evolution of Metropolis's billing, payments, and invoicing systems, establishing standards for financial accuracy, transaction integrity, and compliance that ensure every dollar is correctly captured and accounted for
  2. Design and implement resilient payment processing with support for multiple payment gateways (Stripe, etc.), intelligent routing between processors, retry strategies for failed transactions, and graceful handling of partial failures to maximize payment success rates
  3. Build comprehensive monitoring and reporting for revenue operations, including payment success rates, billing accuracy metrics, reconciliation dashboards, failed transaction alerts, and audit trails that provide visibility from customer transactions to accounting close
  4. Partner with finance and operations teams on payment failures, billing disputes, refund workflows, and reconciliation issues – building tools and automation that reduce manual intervention and improve mean time to resolution for customer-impacting revenue issues
  5. Drive adoption of revenue system best practices across services, including idempotent payment processing, distributed transaction handling, compensation workflows for failures, audit logging, and testing strategies that ensure financial correctness
  6. Own integrations with external systems, including payment gateways, ERP, data analytics, etc., ensuring reliable data flow and maintaining compliance requirements across the revenue stack

Skills

Required

  • 8+ years of hands-on engineering experience with a focus on building revenue systems like payment platforms
  • Strong systems thinking for financial correctness with proven ability to design distributed revenue systems that handle edge cases gracefully: partial failures, duplicate requests, timing issues, currency conversion, tax calculation, and maintaining transaction integrity across service boundaries
  • Database and financial data expertise, including transaction isolation, audit logging, point-in-time recovery, handling financial data migrations, and experience with systems that require both high availability and absolute correctness
  • Payment gateway and integration experience with production knowledge of Stripe, PayPal, or similar processors; tax calculation services; accounting system integrations; and the operational reality of depending on external financial services, including compliance requirements like PCI-DSS
  • Excellent technical communication with the ability to influence technical decisions across teams (particularly finance, accounting, and data teams), document complex systems, conduct post-mortems, and establish reliability standards organization-wide
  • Experience with sophisticated usage of rapidly developing AI-assisted development skills in real-world codebases, including fluent use of Claude Code/GPT Codex/Windsurf or similar tools in multi-agent mode, spec-driven development (SDD), MCP/skills optimization, context/prompt engineering
  • Local to the Seattle area

Nice to have

  • BS or MS in Computer Science or a relevant engineering discipline
  • Expert-level revenue systems engineering with hands-on experience building billing platforms, payment processing pipelines, reconciliation systems, and handling challenges like idempotent transactions, failed payment retries, proration logic, multi-currency support, and revenue recognition – you've seen these problems before and know the patterns that work
  • Expert revenue systems engineering with hands-on experience building billing platforms, payment processing, reconciliation, and managing complex challenges like idempotent transactions, payment retries, proration, multi-currency support, and revenue recognition.
  • Financial systems expertise with deep experience implementing audit trails, reconciliation workflows, revenue reporting, and compliance controls at scale – you understand what it takes to maintain penny-perfect accuracy
  • Java expertise with a deep understanding of JVM performance, concurrency, and operational characteristics. Scala experience is a big plus
  • Experience with AI-powered development tools such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or similar agentic coding tools for enhanced productivity

What the JD emphasized

  • financial accuracy
  • transaction integrity
  • compliance
  • payment success rates
  • billing accuracy metrics
  • audit trails
  • payment failures
  • billing disputes
  • refund workflows
  • reconciliation issues
  • idempotent payment processing
  • distributed transaction handling
  • compensation workflows for failures
  • audit logging
  • testing strategies
  • financial correctness
  • payment gateways
  • ERP
  • data analytics
  • compliance requirements