Principal Engineer (IC)
Clearing Infrastructure & Programmable Treasury
We're hiring a Principal Engineer to help build and evolve Quidkey's foundational systems. This is a hands-on individual contributor role with high autonomy and strategic impact: you'll work closely with the Tech Lead, CTO, and the rest of the engineering team to shape our architecture and ship production-grade infrastructure.
About Quidkey
Quidkey is building an AI-native clearing house for global commerce. Our entry to the market is pay-by-bank checkout; our longer-term goal is a programmable treasury layer that automates what happens after checkout—tax holds, splits, payouts, FX, and reconciliation—so merchants can move faster without losing control.
What Being a Principal Engineer Means at Quidkey
- •You own problems end-to-end (from framing to design to delivery to operations).
- •You're comfortable digging into unfamiliar systems, unblocking yourself, and helping others do the same.
- •You raise the bar on architecture, correctness, reliability, and security.
- •You make the team faster by improving DX, tooling, and technical clarity (not just writing more code).
What You'll Do
- •Own and evolve core platform systems (design, implementation, rollout, on-call/ops as needed).
- •Partner with the Tech Lead, CTO, and the team on technical direction, tradeoffs, and sequencing.
- •Build scalable services across payments, clearing/routing, ledger/reconciliation, and treasury workflows.
- •Turn ambiguous product goals into crisp technical plans, and deliver iteratively.
- •Improve observability: metrics, traces, logging, alerting, incident follow-ups.
- •Partner with product/design to ship features that improve conversion, cost, and reliability.
Ownership Areas (Examples)
- •Pay-by-bank checkout and payment initiation flows
- •Clearing/routing + settlement orchestration
- •Treasury workflow engine (tax holds, splits, payouts, FX automation)
- •Ledgering + reconciliation correctness
- •Platform reliability (SLAs, incident response, runbooks)
What You'll Bring (Requirements)
- •Proven track record shipping and operating production backend systems with strong engineering judgment.
- •Strong system design fundamentals (APIs, data modeling, reliability, security, scalability).
- •Strong SQL and data modeling; experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred).
- •Experience building in a fast-moving environment (startup/scale-up) with high ownership.
- •Product mindset: you care about why and tradeoffs, not only implementation.
- •Clear communicator: you can drive alignment in writing and in design discussions.
Nice to Have
- •TypeScript/Node experience (or adjacent modern backend stacks, e.g. Go, Rust, Python).
- •Fintech, payments, or Open Banking experience.
- •Cloud experience (GCP preferred; AWS also great).
- •Experience with e-commerce platforms (Shopify/WooCommerce) or merchant integrations.
Tech Stack
TypeScript, Node (Express/Fastify), PostgreSQL, GCP.
30 / 90 Day Outcomes
Shipping meaningful improvements to a core flow; comfortable owning one service end-to-end.
Leading design + delivery of a non-trivial platform capability (e.g., routing, workflow execution, reconciliation); measurable improvements in reliability/DX.
Why Join
- •Foundational role shaping architecture and engineering culture alongside the Tech Lead and CTO.
- •High ownership and autonomy; direct collaboration with leadership.
- •Build a new category: AI-native clearing + programmable treasury.
- •Remote-first team.
Interview Process
Context + mutual fit discussion.
Architecture + problem solving session.
Real scenario / system design / debugging exercise.
Alignment and expectations discussion.
Job Summary
- Role
- Principal Engineer (IC)
- Location
- Remote
- Team
- Tech Team
- Job Type
- Full Time