Staff Software Engineer (Backend) - Payments

Collectors is the leading creator of innovative technology that provides value-added services for collectors worldwide. We grade, authenticate, vault, and sell millions of record-setting collectibles, all while modernizing and digitalizing the process to further our mission of helping collectors pursue their passions. We’re always on the lookout for talented people to join our growing team. Our services span collectible trading cards, autographs, comic books, coins, video games, event tickets, and memorabilia. Our subsidiaries include PSA, PCGS, Beckett, SGC, and Card Ladder. Since our founding in 1986, we have graded and authenticated millions of items. We employ more than 3000 people across our headquarters in Santa Ana, California and offices in New Jersey, Texas, Florida, Japan, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Canada, Mexico, Germany, the UK, and France. As part of our interview process, we request that candidates have their cameras on during video interviews. This helps foster meaningful conversation and allows us to create an experience that closely resembles our standard working environment. Certain interview steps may take place by phone. For remote roles, and at our discretion, candidates may be asked to participate in an on-site interview as part of the final stages of the process. We understand there may be occasional circumstances requiring accommodation and are happy to discuss them as needed. Your recruiter will be able to clarify expectations and answer any questions you have. About Collectors Collectors is the leading creator of innovative technology that provides value-added services for collectors worldwide. We grade, authenticate, vault, and sell millions of record-setting collectibles, all while modernizing and digitalizing the process to further our mission of helping collectors pursue their passions. Our services span collectible trading cards, autographs, comic books, coins, video games, event tickets, and memorabilia. Our subsidiaries include PSA, PCGS, Beckett, SGC, and Card Ladder. Since our founding in 1986, we have graded and authenticated millions of items, and today we employ more than 3,000 people across our headquarters in Santa Ana, California and offices in New Jersey, Texas, Florida, Japan, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Canada, Mexico, Germany, and France. We're transforming the collecting experience with technology that brings authentication, grading, and trading into the modern era. Our products are equalizing the playing field by providing tools that make complex research analytics — including pricing, scarcity reports, and historic sales data — accessible to every collector, old or new. Our Product & Engineering mission is to democratize technology while promoting innovation, collaboration, and continuous learning throughout the organization. About the Role We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to set the technical direction for our Payments team — a critical engineering domain responsible for building, scaling, and evolving the payments infrastructure that powers every transaction across the Collectors ecosystem. This team owns the full lifecycle of payment capabilities: integrating with and abstracting across multiple payment gateway providers (including Stripe and PayPal), supporting payment methods spanning credit card, ACH, and digital wallets, and building both the APIs that downstream services depend on and the web application experiences that customers and internal tools rely on. As a Staff Software Engineer, your influence extends beyond your team to the technology organization. You have expertise in the entirety of the Payments portfolio — how our services interact and how money and data flow between them — and you are building the same understanding of adjacent systems across grading, marketplace, vault, and identity.  This is a high-impact, high-visibility role. Payments is the financial backbone of our marketplace — touching grading order checkout, vault and consignment transactions, partner payouts, and customer wallet top-ups. You will own architecture decisions, gateway strategy, and the quality bar for everything that ships. We believe there is significant value in onsite partnership and team collaboration, and candidates within 1-hour commuting distance of the office may be expected to work onsite most of the time. Additional details will be discussed during the recruiting process. What You'll Do Own the architecture of the Payments domain end to end: Hold expertise across the entirety of the team's products and services — C#/.NET payment services, the distributed event-driven systems they run on in AWS and Kubernetes, their relational and NoSQL data stores, gateway integrations, and the frontends they serve — including how they interact, how data flows between them, and how they fail. Architect for iterative, autonomous development and future scaling through clean service boundaries, contract design, clear data ownership, and well-sequenced migration paths. Set multi-gateway strategy and lead high-stakes migrations: Define the abstractions across payment gateway providers — Stripe, PayPal, and others — so that adding, swapping, or failing over between providers is a low-risk, well-understood operation; own payment flows from initiation through settlement, refund, and reconciliation; and drive gateway migrations, payment-method expansion, and re-platforming efforts with low-risk cutovers under live transaction volume, where correctness of money movement is non-negotiable. Set the bar for security, compliance, and resilience: Establish the standards for PCI-DSS practice, tokenization, idempotency, retry and webhook reliability, audit controls, testing strategy, and observability — then use operational data to drive stability and performance improvements, partnering with Security and Compliance to maintain and advance our certifications. Lead complex, multi-quarter delivery: Lead projects of moderate-to-s