Your Responsibilities

As a Staff Software Engineer – Revolving Credit & Merchant Experience for JD IT Financial located in Johnston, IA, you will provide technical leadership across multiple teams and initiatives, with accountability for system design, engineering excellence, and long-term platform evolution. Additionally, you will:

• Define and drive end-to-end technical architecture for revolving credit and merchant experience platforms, ensuring scalability, resilience, security, and regulatory compliance across backend, frontend, and cloud infrastructure
• Lead design and evolution of core backend systems built with Java and Node.js, supporting complex financial workflows including credit origination, underwriting, merchant onboarding, payments, pricing, and servicing lifecycle management
• Establish architectural direction for customer-facing applications using React and Next.js, ensuring high performance, accessibility, consistency, and seamless user experiences across merchant and credit journeys
• Drive early technical discovery and decision-making, evaluating architectural options, identifying risks, aligning trade-offs, and providing clear technical direction to enable predictable delivery by engineering teams
• Own cloud architecture and operational strategy on AWS, defining reference architectures and best practices leveraging services such as ECS/EKS, Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, RDS, SQS/SNS, with a strong focus on reliability, security, observability, and cost optimization
• Partner closely with Product, Design, Risk, Compliance, and Business leaders to translate complex business and regulatory requirements into cohesive, scalable technical solutions that balance innovation, speed, and risk
• Define and enforce security and compliance standards, ensuring secure handling of financial data through strong authentication and authorization models, encryption strategies, PCI compliance, auditability, and defense-in-depth practices
• Drive platform consistency and reuse by defining shared services, common libraries, API standards, UI frameworks, and architectural patterns across merchant and credit ecosystems
• Set expectations for production readiness and operational excellence, including service-level objectives, monitoring and alerting standards, incident response practices, disaster recovery strategies, and continuous resilience improvements
• Act as a technical multiplier, mentoring senior engineers, influencing cross-team design decisions, leading design and architecture reviews, and raising the overall technical bar of the organization

VISA Sponsorship is NOT available for this position

What Skills You Need

• Java (5 or more Years of Experience)
  • Deep expertise in designing large-scale, distributed, and high-availability backend systems using modern Java (8 or more)
  • Mastery of the Spring / Spring Boot ecosystem, with hands-on ownership of REST APIs, security architecture, configuration management, and service frameworks
  • Advanced knowledge of concurrency, JVM internals, performance tuning, memory management, and garbage collection
  • Proven history of owning system architecture, leading cross-team technical reviews, and driving complex production issue investigations and root cause analysis
  • Strong experience integrating messaging platforms (Kafka, RabbitMQ), caching strategies, and external/internal service dependencies
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• Node.js (5 or more Years of Experience)
  • Expert-level experience delivering event-driven, distributed backend services using Node.js and TypeScript at scale
  • Deep understanding of asynchronous programming, event loop mechanics, non-blocking I/O, and performance optimization patterns
  • Proven leadership in designing API platforms, including REST and GraphQL, shared middleware, and standardized security models
  • Extensive experience with frameworks such as NestJS, Express, or Fastify, including establishing architectural and coding standards across teams
  • Ownership of observability, reliability engineering, and major production incident leadership
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  AWS & Cloud Architecture (5 or more Years of Experience)
  • Hands-on leadership designing and governing cloud-native, multi-service architectures on AWS.
  • Expert knowledge of EC2, ECS/EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS, DynamoDB, API Gateway, IAM, and related services
  • Proven ability to define architectures that are secure, highly available, fault tolerant, and cost efficient, aligned with AWS Well-Architected principles
  • Strong experience setting standards for Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, CloudFormation, or AWS CDK, and CI/CD automation
  • Ownership of cloud security posture, observability frameworks, compliance controls, and disaster recovery planning
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• Front-End Architecture (Next.js / React – 5 or more Years)
  • Proven expertise architecting and scaling enterprise-grade frontend platforms using Next.js and React
  • Deep knowledge of SSR, SSG, server components, routing strategies, and frontend performance optimization at scale
  • Experience defining frontend architecture standards, shared component libraries, and integration patterns with backend services
  • Ownership of front-end deployment strategies, build pipelines, and production monitoring and troubleshooting
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• Databases & Data Architecture (5 or more Years of Experience)
  • Expert-level experience designing relational data models using PostgreSQL, MySQL, or Oracle, including transactional integrity and scalability concerns
  • Advanced knowledge of SQL optimization, indexing strategies, transaction isolation, and data consistency models
  • Strong experience with NoSQL and distributed data stores including DynamoDB, MongoDB, and Redis, with sound architectural decision-making
  • Proven ability to design data-intensive systems, manage schema evolution, and ensure reliability, availability, and recoverability at scale
  • Leadership in defining caching, replication, backup, and failover strategies

What Makes You Standout

• Strong background in FinTech, particularly Revolving Credit, Merchant POS, Payments, or Lending Platforms
• Experience applying AI-assisted development tools, including Copilot, LLMs, and emerging AI-driven engineering workflows
• Deep familiarity with observability platforms such as New Relic, including metrics strategy, distributed tracing, and proactive monitoring

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience