Sr. Software Engineer

Job title: Senior Software Engineer

Reports to: Sr. Director, Engineering

Department: Central Services

Location: Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

About Priority:

Priority Commerce is a leading financial technology company on a mission to deliver a personalized, easy-to-adopt financial toolset that accelerates cash flow and optimizes working capital for businesses. Our vision is to eliminate the barriers to unlocking revenue - empowering businesses to grow faster and operate smarter.

We achieve this through the Priority Commerce Engine, an innovative platform that combines payables, acquiring, and banking and treasury solutions. This unified approach allows businesses to streamline financial operations, reduce unnecessary costs, and uncover new revenue opportunities.

At Priority Commerce, we're driven by results. We expect our people to be known for results - bringing expertise, momentum, and relentless focus to every challenge, helping our clients and each other thrive.

About the Role:

You're accountable for projects end-to-end — the components they build stay yours — and the engineers around you are better because you're there. You'll own projects through production, plus the durable components those projects create: projects end; components persist and remain yours.

What we own: The Banking and Treasury Solutions team builds and runs the platforms our merchants use to collect, hold, and send money. These systems process high volumes of transactions for businesses ranging from small merchants to large enterprises. When our systems are right, merchants get paid faster, reconcile with less effort, and get more out of their working capital.

What we’re building now: We’re expanding how merchants can accept payments. We’re also making these methods easier to set up and reconcile. That means building services where idempotency, retries, and auditability are part of the design from day one.

How we work: Product sets what we build and why, and engineers own the quality of what they ship. Our QA engineers own the risk strategy. We solve problems together, not by handoff. We use AI-assisted development day to day, and we ship small and often.

Who you’ll work with: 10 engineers across backend and full-stack, 4 QA engineers, an Architect and a Principal Engineer who together own the domain’s architecture, a product lead, 3 product managers, a designer, and business partners in [e.g., treasury operations, sales, compliance].

What we look for in every Software Engineer: Engineers who own the quality of their own code — tested, validated, production-worthy before anyone downstream sees it. AI-native by default: you direct AI tools with judgment, validate every output, and own everything you ship regardless of what generated it. Outcome-driven, never task-oriented: you can name the customer and business value of what you're building.

Responsibilities:

• Craft — Handles the team's complex, ambiguous work without guidance — the work that would otherwise route to the level above, handed over without a safety net; designs span components and their design docs get used, not filed. Mentors individual engineers in craft, including AI-native technique — their judgment about where AI helps and where it misleads becomes team practice.

• Impact — Commitments on complex work hold because ambiguity gets scoped out before the team commits. Pushes back on work with unclear customer value and proposes a simpler alternative that delivers the same outcome cheaper — and can point to times the pushback changed the plan.

• Ownership — Defines SLOs for their components, including data-integrity where it matters, and the SLOs hold — targets set by what users and consumers need, not by what the system already achieves. Runs incident response calmly; their postmortems produce actions that actually complete. Flakiness and escaped defects in their area trend down — and they can show the fix, not just the trend.

• Influence — Reviews teach, not just gate — and the team's quality bar rises because of them, with the evidence named: the practice that spread, the trend that moved, the engineer who no longer needs the note. A full peer in the team's quality trio (SE + QAE + SDET). The go-to explainer for their components — and actively working not to be the only one, evidenced by who else can now explain them.

• Judgment — Design feedback changes outcomes for users, not just for systems. Spots security and architectural risks at design time, not after. Escalates architectural risk beyond their components to the right owner rather than absorbing or ignoring it.

What Success Looks Like:

You'll be succeeding when complex work ships reliably without rework, an engineer you mentored now handles work that used to need you, your SLOs hold, and your manager would hand you the team's hardest problem without hesitation.

Candidate Requirements:

• Deep experience delivering complex, ambiguous projects end-to-end in production systems
• Evidence of raising a team's bar — mentorship, reviews that taught, designs others built on
• Typically ~5–8 years of experience — a guide, never a gate
• Extensive experience delivering and operating customer-facing product flows across frontend and backend
• Strong API design skills, including the backend-for-frontend pattern and API/client boundary design
• Experience with end-to-end observability: browser monitoring (RUM), API tracing, and async consumers in a single investigation
• Experience optimizing performance across the stack: payload design, caching, optimistic UI
• Deep Java experience with Spring Boot, including idempotency, retries, transactional boundaries, and event-driven patterns (e.g., Kafka, SQS) behind user actions.
• Deep Python experience with FastAPI, Django, or Flask, including async I/O, and production-grade service design

Nice-to-Haves

• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related quantitative field, or equivalent practical experience
• Experience leading technical design and incident response for services in production
• Extensive experience delivering and operating customer-facing product flows across frontend and backend
• Strong API design skills, including the backend-for-frontend pattern and API/client boundary design
• Experience optimizing performance across the stack

Preferred

• Experience in payments, banking, or another regulated financial-services domain — systems that move money, store cardholder data, or touch card network/ACH rails
• Familiarity with PCI DSS (especially audit-trail, logging, and access-control requirements) or adjacent frameworks like SOC 2 Type II and SOX IT general controls (change management, access reviews, log retention)
• Experience with fraud detection, chargebacks/disputes, reconciliation, or AML/KYC systems

Work Environment & Culture:

We believe that performance and experience go hand in hand - an exceptional employee experience is earned through contribution. We are a results-driven team, grounded in our core values: ownership, authenticity, service, trust, innovation, and camaraderie.

Our culture is built for those who want to make an impact. We challenge each other to grow, celebrate progress, and support one another through shared goals and real connection. Whether you're building technology, serving clients, or supporting internal teams, you’ll be part of a company that empowers you to perform at your best and be known for results.

Compensation and Benefits:

Compensation range: [$115k-$142k CAD]

We invest in the whole employee - personally and professionally. Our benefits package is designed to support your well-being, growth, and success - both inside and outside of work.

Financial Wellness

• Bonus programs
• 401(k) match
• Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP)
• HSA and FSA options
• Financial wellness resources and employee discount programs

Health & Well-being

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Mental health support for employees and dependents through Lyra Health
• Family planning and women’s health benefits through Carrot
• Gym membership reimbursement and virtual wellness programs (including yoga)

Time Off

• 3 weeks PTO to start, with unlimited PTO after year one

Growth & Development

• Education expense reimbursement
• Leadership development programs
• Certified Payments Professional (CPP) certification support

We believe great performance starts with feeling supported - and we’ve built our benefits with that in mind.

Traditional Physical Requirements:

• Requires prolonged sitting, standing, bending, stooping and stretching.
• Requires the ability to lift 10 pounds.
• Requires eye-hand coordination, manual dexterity and a normal range of hearing and vision (with or without correction).

Join our team at Priority Technology Holdings, Inc. and be part of a dynamic and innovative company that is transforming the financial technology landscape. Together, we can shape the future of payments and banking solutions while providing unmatched value to our clients.