Level

Sardine

Staff Engineer - Fraud Prevention

Sardine is hiring a Staff Engineer - Fraud Prevention for a remote role open to applicants in United States. It pays $190k-$275k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Sardine.

Level's read on this job

  • On Level's scale, this role is Little AI ●○○○: aI is not part of the work.
  • This is listed as a remote role.
  • The posting mentions backend, distributed systems and system architecture among its tools and skills.
  • Level classes it as a lead role.
  • Sardine has 48 other open roles on Level.

AI in this role

Architect real-time fraud prevention systems and ultra-low-latency backend services at Sardine.

backenddistributed-systemssystem-architecturedatabase-designfraud-prevention

Who we are:

Sardine is the leading agentic risk platform for fighting financial crime. Our integrated solution unifies data across risk teams to help organizations stop fraud in real time, prevent AI-driven attacks, and automate fraud and AML operations. Sardine’s platform is strengthened by one of the fastest-growing fraud consortiums in the market, spanning more than 6 billion profiled devices, 800 million consumers, and 3 million businesses worldwide. Leading companies including FIS, GoDaddy, Intuit, Edward Jones, ZoomInfo, and Checkout.com rely on Sardine to secure and grow trust in their products.

Our culture:

  • We hire talented, self-motivated individuals with extreme ownership and high growth orientation.

  • We value performance and not hours worked. We believe you shouldn't have to miss your family dinner, your kid's school play, friends get-together, or doctor's appointments for the sake of adhering to an arbitrary work schedule.

  • We're a remote-first team spread across time zones, so no office to report to - work from wherever helps you do your best work. Just a couple of things to keep in mind: pay is based on where you're located, and you'll need to keep a home base in the country you're hired in. So while we love the "coffee shop today, mountains tomorrow" life, this isn't a passport-optional, work-from-anywhere-on-Earth kind of remote - think flexible within your country, not borderless.

Location:

  • Remote - USA or Canada

  • Given the strategic nature of this role, we expect a degree of flexibility for somewhat regular in-person meetings with our leadership team in San Francisco, Berkeley.

About the Role

You will serve as the technical steward and platform architect for both our Consumer Fraud and Business Fraud engineering teams. This position involves driving technical strategy, optimizing mission-critical infrastructure, mentoring engineers, and assuming broad ownership of a platform that processes massive volumes of data in real-time.

What you’ll be doing:

  • Act as the overarching technical leader for multiple teams, partnering with stakeholders to unify platform strategy.

  • Architect, design, and optimize ultra-low-latency backend services and a high-throughput rules engine.

  • Design optimal data access patterns, partitioning strategies, and caching layers across our complex, multi-cloud database ecosystem.

  • Develop robust pipelines for massive parallel execution of real-time feature computations and aggregations.

  • Play a pivotal role in shaping engineering culture, mentoring senior engineers, and driving high technical standards from conception to delivery.

What you’ll need:

  • 7+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record operating at a Staff, Principal, or Lead Architect level.

  • Deep expertise in building highly available, distributed systems with strict ultra-low latency.

  • Hands-on experience working with stream processing frameworks (e.g., Kafka, Flink, SQS, PubSub) in production environments.

  • Advanced proficiency in polyglot persistence, with experience tuning data models across Document, Wide-Column, and Relational databases.

  • A strong platform engineering mindset focused on reliability, observability, and developer velocity.

  • Proficiency in communicating complex architectural concepts and driving cross-team consensus.

Benefits we offer:

  • Generous compensation in cash and equity

  • Early exercise for all options, including pre-vested

  • Work from anywhere: Remote-first Culture

  • Flexible paid time off and Year-end break

  • Health insurance, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents - US and Canada specific

  • 4% matching in 401k / RRSP - US and Canada specific

  • MacBook Pro delivered to your door

  • One-time stipend to set up a home office — desk, chair, screen, etc.

  • Monthly meal stipend

  • Monthly social meet-up stipend

  • Annual health and wellness stipend

  • Annual Learning stipend

Join a fast-growing company with world-class professionals from around the world. If you are seeking a meaningful career, you found the right place, and we would love to hear from you.

To learn more about how we process your personal information and your rights in regards to your personal information as an applicant and Sardine employee, please visit our Applicant and Worker Privacy Notice.

How we rate this

Staff Engineer - Fraud Prevention at Sardine rates 20 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Little AI (AI Level 1 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Little AI. AI is not part of the work.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

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

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

BackendDistributed SystemsSystem ArchitectureDatabase DesignFraud Prevention

Questions you could be asked

  1. Tell me about a project where backend was part of your work. What did you do?
  2. Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
  3. Tell me about a project where system architecture was part of your work. What did you do?
  4. Tell me about a project where database design was part of your work. What did you do?
  5. Tell me about a project where fraud prevention was part of your work. What did you do?

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: Backend, Distributed Systems, System Architecture, Database Design, and Fraud Prevention. 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.

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