Principal Software Engineer — Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM)

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. Location: Ramat Hasharon, Israel — Hybrid, Full-time Group: Platform (Product & Technology Group) Reports to: Senior R&D Director, CLM Role summary We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to serve as the senior technical individual contributor in the CLM domain — the systems behind Payoneer's KYC, onboarding, licensing, and compliance. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an engineer who shapes architecture and engineering excellence across the domain through depth and influence rather than direct authority. You'll spend real time in design and code, solve our hardest cross-crew problems, and be a primary force behind embedding AI — both in how we build and in what we ship — with a coherent North Star of AI-driven KYC orchestration. What you'll do • Drive the technical direction. Define and evolve the target architecture for CLM backend systems, keeping the AI-driven KYC North Star aligned with what ships each quarter. • Solve the hardest problems. Take on the ambiguous, high-stakes technical challenges that span multiple crews, services, and domains across KYC, onboarding, licensing, and compliance. • Set the engineering bar. Establish patterns, standards, and best practices, and raise the technical bar through design reviews, coding standards, and architectural direction. • Lead the AI work. Architect AI-enabled capabilities into the product — LLM integration, RAG, agentic/multi-step workflows, evals — and accelerate R&D through AI tooling, agents, and MCPs. • Design the agentic KYC platform. Lead the design of orchestrator/agent patterns, modular capability interfaces (OCR, authenticity, compare, online validation), and safe integration between cloud and on-premises services. • Explore emerging tech. Prototype and drive adoption of MCP (Model Context Protocol) and agent-based architectures where they create real business or engineering value. • Modernize. Push the domain toward cloud-native infrastructure (.NET, Kubernetes/AWS), service migration, observability, automated testing, and DevOps maturity. • Multiply the team. Mentor crew architects, team leads, and senior engineers; influence technical strategy across crews and organizational boundaries without relying on direct authority. • Partner across functions. Translate business, product, and regulatory requirements into sound, scalable designs, and communicate them clearly to engineering and product stakeholders. • Stay hands-on. Remain deep in code and design — not just diagrams — as a trusted technical advisor to engineering and product leadership. What we're looking for • Extensive software development background with a track record of operating at a senior IC / principal level, leading design across teams. • Deep distributed-systems expertise: consistency, availability, fault tolerance, concurrency, distributed transactions, messaging, event-driven architecture (SAGA, error tolerance, zero-data-loss concepts), and scale. • Meaningful hands-on experience with a major cloud provider (AWS strongly preferred) — architecting and operating production workloads, including container orchestration (Kubernetes). • Experience architecting AI-enabled systems — LLM integration patterns, RAG, agentic/multi-step workflows, evals, and AI-specific production concerns (latency, cost, fallback, hallucination control). • AI-fluent: daily, hands-on use of AI coding tools with clear judgment on when to trust output vs. rewrite it — and beyond usage, you configure it (custom instructions, rules, MCPs, tools) and build workflows and skills, not just prompts. • Proven ability to take ambiguous, complex problems and turn them into reliable, scalable production systems. • Strong product mindset — able to balance technical excellence with business outcomes. • Excellent communication and the ability to influence engineering and product decisions across organizational boundaries, plus demonstrated mentorship of senior engineers, tech leads, and architects. Not a must, but a great advantage • Financial services, fintech, or regulated-domain background (KYC/identity, compliance, licensing). • Experience integrating cloud services with on-premises/enterprise systems via gateways or brokered connectivity. • Hands-on backend experience with .NET/C# and/or TypeScript/Node.js. • Big-data / NoSQL experience, and familiarity with SQL Server. Why this role You'll operate at the intersection of technology, architecture, and product — working on complex problems at global scale, shaping how a core regulated domain builds software in an increasingly AI-first world, and helping develop the next generation of technical leaders in CLM. #LI-CD1 The Payoneer Ways of Working Act as our customer’s partner on the inside Learning what they need and creating what will help them go further. Do it. Own it. Being fearlessly accountable in everything we do. Continuously improve Always striving for a higher standard than our last. Build each other up Helping each other grow, as professionals and people. If this sounds like a business, a community, and a mission you want to be part of, apply today. We are committed to providing a diverse and inclusive workplace. Payoneer is an equal opportunity employer, and all qualified applicants will receive consideratio