Principal Engineer

About Payoneer Founded in 2005, Payoneer is the global financial platform that removes friction from doing business across borders, with a mission to connect the world’s underserved businesses to a rising global economy. We’re a community with over 2,500 colleagues all over the world, working to serve customers, and partners in over 190 countries and territories. By taking the complexity out of the financial workflows–including everything from global payments and compliance to multi-currency and workforce management, to providing working capital and business intelligence–we give businesses the tools they need to work efficiently worldwide and grow with confidence. Principal Engineer – Backend About Payoneer Payoneer empowers businesses, professionals, and enterprises to participate in the global economy by enabling seamless cross-border payments and financial services. Our technology powers critical financial workflows at global scale, with a strong focus on reliability, security, scalability, and innovation. The Opportunity We are looking for a Principal Engineer – Backend to provide technical leadership across Payoneer's backend engineering organization and help shape the next generation of our distributed financial systems. This is a high-impact individual contributor role for an engineer who combines deep expertise in distributed systems and backend architecture with strong product thinking and organizational influence. As a Principal Engineer, you will work on some of Payoneer's most complex technical challenges, define architectural direction, drive engineering excellence, and enable multiple teams to build reliable, scalable, and resilient systems. The role also requires an AI-first mindset in identifying opportunities to use AI and agentic technologies to improve how we build, operate, and evolve our products and engineering systems. You will also help explore and build systems using emerging protocols and technologies such as MCP (Model Context Protocol). What You'll Do • Define and drive the technical and architectural vision for large-scale backend systems and distributed platforms. • Design and build highly scalable, resilient, secure, and fault-tolerant distributed systems supporting Payoneer's global financial infrastructure. • Solve complex technical problems spanning multiple systems, services, teams, and domains. • Drive architectural decisions and establish engineering patterns, standards, and best practices across teams. • Lead the evolution of backend platforms toward greater scalability, reliability, observability, performance, and developer productivity. • Act as a technical leader and trusted advisor to engineering leadership, product leaders, and other stakeholders. • Work closely with engineering teams to identify and address systemic technical challenges and technical debt. • Champion an AI-first approach to software engineering, identifying opportunities to leverage LLMs, AI agents, automation, and intelligent developer tooling across the software development lifecycle. • Explore, prototype, and drive adoption of emerging AI technologies, including MCP (Model Context Protocol) and agent-based architectures, where they can create meaningful business or engineering value. • Partner with teams across engineering, product, security, infrastructure, data, and other functions to solve complex cross-domain problems. • Influence technical strategy across multiple engineering teams and organizational boundaries, without relying solely on direct authority. • Mentor and coach engineering leads, senior engineers, and architects, helping raise the technical bar across the organization. • Help develop the next generation of technical leaders through architecture reviews, design discussions, technical mentorship, and knowledge sharing. • Establish and promote practices around engineering excellence, system design, reliability, security, testing, observability, and operational readiness. • Lead technical initiatives that require coordination across geographically distributed and cross-functional teams. • Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. • Stay current with emerging technologies and continuously evaluate how they can improve Payoneer's engineering capabilities. What We're Looking For • Extensive experience designing and building large-scale distributed systems and backend platforms. • Strong expertise in backend engineering, system architecture, APIs, microservices, data-intensive systems, and cloud-native architectures. • Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts including consistency, availability, fault tolerance, concurrency, distributed transactions, messaging, event-driven architectures, and scalability. • Proven experience leading architecture and technical strategy across multiple engineering teams or complex technology domains. • Strong track record of taking ambiguous, complex problems and translating them into scalable technical solutions. • Experience operating systems at significant scale with strong requirements around availability, performance, security, and reliability. • Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure, observability, production operations, and modern software engineering practices. • Experience with AI/LLM technologies and a demonstrated interest in building AI-first engineering systems and workflows. • Familiarity with AI agents, MCP (Model Context Protocol), tool calling, agentic workflows, or similar emerging AI technologies is highly desirable. • Excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills, with the ability to influence engineering and product decisions across organizational boundaries. • Demonstrated ability to mentor senior engineers, tech leads, and technical leaders. • Strong product mindset and the ability to balance technical excellence with business outcomes. • Comfortable working in a globally distributed, cr