Staff Backend Engineer, Rewards SaaS Core Platform

Nice to Meet You! We are Ascenda
Ascenda provides the rewards infrastructure for leading financial services brands across the world.Our clients include the world’s largest banks, top tier card issuers and fintechs who utilise our rewards infrastructure to power their earn & burn rewards programs. These include American Express, CapitalOne, HSBC, Brex, Virgin Money, SMBC, ICBC, Bradesco, ANZ, HDFC and Top 10 financial services brands in many other countries.With a best-in-class technology suite and the world’s broadest rewards content marketplace, we are the engine behind winning premium rewards propositions for financial services all around the globe.Our clients are spread across continents, and we serve over 1 billion customers globally. No matter where you are in the world, you’ll recognize our footprint!We believe that nothing should stand in the way of companies who strive to drive growth via compelling and effortless rewards propositions that their customers love.Welcome to the future of customer growth. Join us as we shape the future of rewards in financial services!

The Rewards SaaS Core Platform team sits at the center of our globally distributed architecture, orchestrating and coordinating workflows and actions, both API and user-driven, across the entire rewards platform. The architecture of our system presents an array of unique and compelling technical challenges that you will play a key role in designing and building - scaling the overall rewards platform to support thousands of customers around the world.

As a Staff Engineer at Ascenda, you will:

• Build and architect resilient and performant workflows/actions that require orchestration with multiple services in a distributed multi-tenant architecture.
• Design, build and operate external/public facing APIs at scale, dealing with intricate elements such as versioning, backward compatibility, performance tuning, observability, batch actions, and more.
• Act as a custodian of software and code quality in your team, setting high quality standards and taking part in code-review and architecture review sessions.
• Lead the charge in resolving day to day issues by critically analyzing situations, evaluating alternative solutions, and steering the team towards simplistic, effective solutions.
• Play a key role in resolving and mitigating production incident, working closely with the team and other stakeholders to improve operational processes, monitoring and tooling, as well as put in improvements to prevent incidents from re-occurring.
• Liase cross-functionally with teams that are integrated with your team's services, ensuring that both your own team and other team's needs are met. 

Ultimately, as a Staff Engineer on the Rewards SaaS Core Platform team and in Ascenda's engineering organisation, you are responsible for providing technical leadership and mentorship to your fellow team members, as well as make strategic decisions to evolve system architecture to meet future needs, both within your own team and in the context of the larger engineering organisation. Together with other Staff Engineers in the company, you will be a key part of our staff engineering organization, driving technical excellence across the company. 

• Minimum 8+ years of experience as a software engineer, focusing on high-scale multi-tenant SaaS applications, working mostly on backend services.
• Have a proven track record of leading teams through problem-solving and successful project/product execution and delivery.

• Have expertise with tackling complex, distributed systems/infrastructure challenges at scale.

• You have experience building systems that orchestrate complex workflows across multiple services and have used tools such as Temporal/Airflow/Cadence/Kafka.

• You have extensive knowledge of API design principles, patterns, and best practice, and have proven experience building and operating a large scale API service.

• You have experience and enjoy mentoring and investing in the career development of engineers and peers.

• You are comfortable with leading initiatives spanning multiple teams, leveraging deep technical knowledge to influence roadmaps and architectural decisions.

Important: This role will be primarily based out of Australia (Remote). We have team members spread across both Sydney and Melbourne. We're open to candidates who are already eligible to work in Australia (e.g. Citizens, PR / valid work authorization).