Staff Software Engineer II

Today, through BHN's single global platform, businesses of all kinds can tap into the world's largest network of branded payment solutions. BHN helps businesses grow revenue, increase loyalty, motivate and reward their teams, disburse funds and engage consumers. Branded payment solutions include the issuance and distribution of gift cards, egifts, corporate payouts and rewards, along with the technology to deliver these products in seamless, integrated ways. BHN's network spans the globe with more than 400,000 consumer touchpoints. Learn more at

Blackhawk Network is building a digital platform that connects people and brands through innovative payment solutions. We facilitate cross-channel payments via cash-in, cash-out, and mobile payment systems. By leveraging blockchain, smart contracts, serverless technology, and real-time payment systems, we're unlocking access for the next million users through innovation.

Our teams work with the world's biggest brands to deliver cutting-edge payment experiences. We're composed of highly talented engineers who value collaboration, mentorship, and technical excellence. If you're passionate about building world-class payment applications and pushing the boundaries of scale and availability in the cloud, this role is for you.

Join our innovative Engineering team to build the next generation of payment systems on public cloud infrastructure. You'll work on high-scale, high-precision systems that serve millions of merchants worldwide, stretching the limits of backend technologies while leveraging cutting-edge cloud and application stacks. 

• Opportunity to work on payment systems serving millions of users globally 
• Collaboration with world-class engineering teams and industry experts 
• Strong investment in professional growth and career development 
• Cutting-edge technology stack and modern development practices 
• Meaningful impact on product development through data-driven decisions

• Design and develop scalable products with high availability, fault tolerance, and automated failover capabilities.
• Define comprehensive technical solutions to address well-scoped business problems.
• Create clear and efficient work breakdown structures to maximize team productivity and delivery efficiency.
• Write clean, reusable, and testable code, and champion technical excellence through peer code reviews.
• Mentor and coach team members to strengthen their technical capabilities and overall effectiveness.
• Influence design decisions proactively, advocating for best practices and continuous technical improvements.
• Contribute to technical discussions and decisions, driving changes to team standards and practices through collaborative reviews.
• Demonstrate initiative by independently implementing process improvements that enhance team operations.
• Lead architectural design efforts for product features, producing key artifacts during the discovery phase in collaboration with Principal Engineers.
• Communicate effectively with senior stakeholders, providing insights, interpretations, and recommendations across organizational boundaries.
• Drive alignment across teams and stakeholders, influencing the adoption of new concepts, practices, and approaches.
• Identify and articulate problem statements, evaluate opportunities, and present impactful ideas to leadership to shape product and organizational direction.

Required:

• 8+ years of experience in back-end engineering, including hands-on leadership roles. 
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field. Advanced degrees are a plus.
• Designing high performing APIs with less than 50ms Service Level Agreement (SLA) using Java, Spring, Spring Boot, and relational/non-relational database.
• Strong computational skills, fluent in data structures, algorithms and design patterns. 
• Strong knowledge of computing concepts such as service-oriented architecture, REST services, fault tolerance, self-healing, network protocols, network programming, multi-threaded programming, performance, reliability, scalability, and security(OWASP).
• Ability to differentiate good and bad, design and coding practices.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills.
• Strong in self-direction, problem solving and critical thinking. Provides technical leadership of large and complex initiatives, defines and implements technical solutions for a business problem with many unknowns. 
• Identifies and priorize technical improvements to deliver value while minimizing complexity. 
• Guiding technical conversation towards best technical solution, reducing information asymmetry through spirited debate and open/honest conversations.
• Partners with peers to identify and prioritize technical improvements backed by data, industry trends and experience to convince leadership on the best solution for the problems. 
• Deep passion for providing high quality customer experiences. 
• Familiarity with the whole web stack, including protocols and web server optimization techniques

Preferred:

• Experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS) including RDS and EC2.
• Experience with AI/LLM tools and container-based development (Docker/Kubernetes)
• 2+ years of technology leadership experience in a modern / complex payment environment.

We seek candidates who not only demonstrate curiosity and adaptability in emerging technologies but have also successfully implemented and utilized AI tools to enhance their work, improve processes, or deliver measurable results.  Our teams embrace continuous learning and the thoughtful integration of AI to create meaningful impact – for our employees and the future of work.