Principal Engineer

AI in this role

Principal Backend Engineer to drive technical vision for distributed financial systems with a focus on AI, agentic technologies, and MCP.

mcp

ai-agentsdistributed-systemsbackend-architecturetechnical-leadershipagentic-technologies

About Payoneer

Founded in 2005, Payoneer is the global financial platform that removes friction from doing business across borders, with a mission to connect the world’s underserved businesses to a rising global economy. We’re a community with over 2,500 colleagues all over the world, working to serve customers, and partners in over 190 countries and territories.

By taking the complexity out of the financial workflows–including everything from global payments and compliance to multi-currency and workforce management, to providing working capital and business intelligence–we give businesses the tools they need to work efficiently worldwide and grow with confidence.

Principal Engineer – Backend

About Payoneer

Payoneer empowers businesses, professionals, and enterprises to participate in the global economy by enabling seamless cross-border payments and financial services. Our technology powers critical financial workflows at global scale, with a strong focus on reliability, security, scalability, and innovation.

The Opportunity

We are looking for a Principal Engineer – Backend to provide technical leadership across Payoneer's backend engineering organization and help shape the next generation of our distributed financial systems.

This is a high-impact individual contributor role for an engineer who combines deep expertise in distributed systems and backend architecture with strong product thinking and organizational influence.

As a Principal Engineer, you will work on some of Payoneer's most complex technical challenges, define architectural direction, drive engineering excellence, and enable multiple teams to build reliable, scalable, and resilient systems.

The role also requires an AI-first mindset in identifying opportunities to use AI and agentic technologies to improve how we build, operate, and evolve our products and engineering systems. You will also help explore and build systems using emerging protocols and technologies such as MCP (Model Context Protocol).

What You'll Do

• Define and drive the technical and architectural vision for large-scale backend systems and distributed platforms. • Design and build highly scalable, resilient, secure, and fault-tolerant distributed systems supporting Payoneer's global financial infrastructure. • Solve complex technical problems spanning multiple systems, services, teams, and domains. • Drive architectural decisions and establish engineering patterns, standards, and best practices across teams. • Lead the evolution of backend platforms toward greater scalability, reliability, observability, performance, and developer productivity. • Act as a technical leader and trusted advisor to engineering leadership, product leaders, and other stakeholders. • Work closely with engineering teams to identify and address systemic technical challenges and technical debt. • Champion an AI-first approach to software engineering, identifying opportunities to leverage LLMs, AI agents, automation, and intelligent developer tooling across the software development lifecycle. • Explore, prototype, and drive adoption of emerging AI technologies, including MCP (Model Context Protocol) and agent-based architectures, where they can create meaningful business or engineering value. • Partner with teams across engineering, product, security, infrastructure, data, and other functions to solve complex cross-domain problems. • Influence technical strategy across multiple engineering teams and organizational boundaries, without relying solely on direct authority. • Mentor and coach engineering leads, senior engineers, and architects, helping raise the technical bar across the organization. • Help develop the next generation of technical leaders through architecture reviews, design discussions, technical mentorship, and knowledge sharing. • Establish and promote practices around engineering excellence, system design, reliability, security, testing, observability, and operational readiness. • Lead technical initiatives that require coordination across geographically distributed and cross-functional teams. • Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. • Stay current with emerging technologies and continuously evaluate how they can improve Payoneer's engineering capabilities.

What We're Looking For

• Extensive experience designing and building large-scale distributed systems and backend platforms. • Strong expertise in backend engineering, system architecture, APIs, microservices, data-intensive systems, and cloud-native architectures. • Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts including consistency, availability, fault tolerance, concurrency, distributed transactions, messaging, event-driven architectures, and scalability. • Proven experience leading architecture and technical strategy across multiple engineering teams or complex technology domains. • Strong track record of taking ambiguous, complex problems and translating them into scalable technical solutions. • Experience operating systems at significant scale with strong requirements around availability, performance, security, and reliability. • Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure, observability, production operations, and modern software engineering practices. • Experience with AI/LLM technologies and a demonstrated interest in building AI-first engineering systems and workflows. • Familiarity with AI agents, MCP (Model Context Protocol), tool calling, agentic workflows, or similar emerging AI technologies is highly desirable. • Excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills, with the ability to influence engineering and product decisions across organizational boundaries. • Demonstrated ability to mentor senior engineers, tech leads, and technical leaders. • Strong product mindset and the ability to balance technical excellence with business outcomes. • Comfortable working in a globally distributed, cross-functional engineering environment.

What Success Looks Like

In this role, success means having an impact beyond the systems you directly build.

You will:

• Shape the architecture and technical direction of critical Payoneer platforms. • Enable multiple engineering teams to build and operate better distributed systems. • Raise the technical bar through mentorship, architecture leadership, and engineering practices. • Help Payoneer adopt an AI-first engineering culture and identify high-value opportunities for AI and agentic technologies. • Drive successful adoption of emerging technologies such as MCP where appropriate. • Improve the scalability, reliability, security, and efficiency of our platforms. • Become a trusted technical partner to engineering, product, and business leadership.

Why This Role

The Principal Engineer role provides an opportunity to operate at the intersection of technology, architecture, product, and organizational leadership.

You will work on complex problems at global scale, influence technology strategy across teams, mentor the next generation of engineering leaders, and help shape how Payoneer builds software in an increasingly AI-first world.

The Payoneer Ways of Working

Act as our customer’s partner on the inside
Learning what they need and creating what will help them go further.

Do it. Own it.
Being fearlessly accountable in everything we do.

Continuously improve
Always striving for a higher standard than our last.

Build each other up
Helping each other grow, as professionals and people.

If this sounds like a business, a community, and a mission you want to be part of, apply today.

We are committed to providing a diverse and inclusive workplace. Payoneer is an equal opportunity employer, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment no matter your race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. If you require reasonable accommodation at any stage of the hiring process, please speak to the recruiter managing the role for any adjustments. Decisions about requests for reasonable accommodation are made on a case-by-case basis.

How we rate this

Principal Engineer at Payoneer rates 60 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.

●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Open the description and count.

Prepare for this job

A free preview built only from this posting: what it asks for, what you could be asked in an interview, and how to adjust your resume.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

AI AgentsDistributed SystemsBackend ArchitectureTechnical LeadershipAgentic TechnologiesMcp

Questions you could be asked

How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where backend architecture was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where technical leadership was part of your work. What did you do?
Tell me about a project where agentic technologies was part of your work. What did you do?

Adapt your resume

List these exact terms on your resume: AI Agents, Distributed Systems, Backend Architecture, Technical Leadership, and Agentic Technologies. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them — a tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project — this role expects it to be a running habit.

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