Senior Software Engineer, Risk - Vancouver - Paramount Commerce

Description

Based in Canada and headquartered in Toronto, Paramount Commerce is a fintech company focused on making payments simpler and more secure. We've been helping reshape online payments since the early 2000s, enabling people to pay directly from their bank accounts, without relying on credit cards or e-wallets.

As a proud member of Payments Canada, we're deeply connected to the evolving financial landscape, helping ensure our solutions remain compliant, reliable, and future ready. Security, risk management, and data integrity are at the core of everything we build, and we power payment solutions that are seamless, thoughtfully designed, and built to scale.

As we continue to grow our business across Canada and prepare for expansion into new markets, we're looking for curious, thoughtful, data driven individuals who enjoy directly solving complex problems themselves and pushing ideas from concept to execution, in a rapid iterative environment with highly capable peers. If you're excited about building the future of payments – and want to be part of a team that's shaping what's next – we'd love to hear from you.

The Opportunity

We're on the lookout for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Risk Engineering Team. Our Risk team sits at the heart of our payments platform, responsible for protecting our customers from financial fraud, ensuring compliance with the regulatory bodies that oversee our financial partners, and making high confidence decisions in real time as money moves through the system. We're building the next generation of our risk platform: low‑latency orchestration + configurable rules + event‑driven auditability.

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Risk team, you'll help design and build the systems that analyze every transaction as it happens, validating bank accounts, screening for sanctions, detecting fraud, and identifying money laundering and layering patterns. This is complex, high impact work that blends distributed systems, data‑driven decision making, and deep levels of responsibility and ownership.

The systems you build won't just process data, they'll actively prevent financial crime, safeguard our platform, and enable secure, compliant payments at scale.

What You'll Do

You'll own meaningful parts of our real‑time risk platform end to end, from early ambiguity and technical design through implementation, deployment, and iteration. Your work will include:

• Risk Scoring & Orchestration: designing low‑latency systems end to end with parallel checks, strict timeouts, fail‑open behavior, and safe cancellation semantics
• Rule Engine Foundations: building configurable rules, evaluation strategies, test modes, and merchant specific logic
• Risk Signals & Checks: implementing name matching, sanctions and negative lists, third‑party fraud checks, and device/IP/location signals
• Event Pipelines & Audit Trails: ensuring reliable event production using patterns like outbox, with strong consistency and no silent drops
• Performance & Reliability: improving p95/p99 latency, handling backpressure, retries, idempotency, and hardening systems for production incidents
• Production Ownership: building and operating services (primarily Golang & Kubernetes based), adding observability that answers real questions, and sharing on‑call responsibility
• Collaboration & Influence: partnering closely with Product, Data, and Risk stakeholders to ship iteratively, mentor teammates, and drive thoughtful technical decisions
• AI‑Assisted Development: using AI tools to accelerate understanding and validate assumptions, while maintaining strong engineering judgment

Tech Stack

• Golang + Kubernetes for real‑time services
• Postgres (CNPG) + Redis for low‑latency storage/caching
• WarpStream (Kafka‑compatible) for event streaming + outbox/replay
• BigQuery as the analytics warehouse (risk insights, reporting, model evaluation)
• Airbyte for ingestion/ELT into BigQuery
• Observability: Grafana + Prometheus (+ tracing/logging)
• React + Microfrontends for self‑serve/configuration/investigation tools
• CI/CD and multi‑cloud (AWS/GCP)

What Success Looks Like

• In your first 30‑60 days, you'll ship a real production feature and take ownership of a subsystem with clear metrics (latency/error categories/event delivery). You'll improve something measurable: a reliability gap, an operational blind spot, or p99 tail latency.

Who You Are

We're looking for a senior engineer who combines strong technical depth with sound judgment, ownership, and collaboration. Someone who enjoys solving hard problems that matter.

Must Haves

• 8+ years of engineering experience
• Strong in Go skills, including building services with concurrency, timeouts/cancellation, and clean APIs
• Kubernetes and production operations experience (deployments, rollouts, troubleshooting, resource tuning)
• Solid distributed systems fundamentals: retries, idempotency, backpressure, failure modes, and safe degradation (fail‑open vs fail‑closed)
• Solid data modeling + SQL (Postgres), with disciplined schema evolution, migrations, and validation
• Observability‑first approach, can design and use metrics/logs/tracing to debug issues and improve p95/p99 performance (Grafana/Prometheus or equivalent)
• Comfortable with CI/CD pipelines and automated testing; you ship iteratively and safely (feature flags, progressive rollout, strong PR hygiene)
• Production ownership, willing to participate in on‑call rotation, contribute to incident response, and drive root‑cause fixes
• Ability to use AI tools to support exploration, code comprehension, and validation, without outsourcing critical thinking
• Can balance speed, quality, and complexity, and make thoughtful decisions in ambiguous situations
• Level‑headed ability to bring calm to complexity. You're confident without ego, motivated, and steady in fast‑paced environments
• Strong opinions, loosely held. You care deeply about doing great work, advocate for your ideas, and are equally open to new perspectives

Nice to Haves

• Payments / fraud / risk / compliance experience
• Event‑driven architecture (outbox, streaming, CQRS concepts)
• Performance profiling and optimization (latency and allocations)
• Experience building internal tooling or configuration heavy platforms (rules/workflows)

How We Work

We move fast, ship in small increments, and use production feedback loops to improve. This is a high ownership team that moves quickly, and will expect you to operate what you build and communicate clearly.

If you're someone who enjoys high ownership with strong alignment on outcomes, you'll have autonomy to propose and drive architecture decisions, crisp communication and practical delivery, you make and work well in an AI driven environment, then you'll fit right in.

We value curiosity, self‑directed learning, and people who enjoy stretching beyond what they already know. If everything above doesn't perfectly describe you, but you're excited to learn, adapt, and grow into new areas, we'd still love to hear from you.

Why Paramount Commerce?

• Canadian company with over 22 years of history
• Competitive salary
• Generous defined vacation benefits + summer fridays
• Health & dental benefits
• Wellness spending account
• Retirement savings matching plan
• Remote first environment
• Quality hardware provided to do your work
• Parental leave top up program
• Birthday day off
• Quarterly socials
• Volunteer days to give back to our community

The base salary range for this full‑time position is $145,000 – $190,000 CAD. Final compensation will be dependent on experience, skillset, and role‑related qualifications, and will include benefits and bonus as per company policy. Please note that base salary ranges may differ based on location and local currency.

We use technology assisted tools, including artificial intelligence, to support parts of our recruitment process (such as resume screening, note taking, and interview scheduling). These tools are designed to support, but never replace human judgement. All hiring decisions are made by humans, and we are committed to fair, inclusive, and bias‑aware hiring practices.

DEI

At Paramount Commerce, we are proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and we do our best to make sure all people feel supported and connected at work. We practice ethical and fair hiring processes and strongly encourage applications from all backgrounds. We believe that different perspectives, experiences, backgrounds, and skill sets are what make for high performing teams, and we are committed to creating a place for our employees to be their authentic selves. Don't worry if you don't check every box. If you're excited about this role and think you'd be a good fit, we encourage you to apply.

Accommodations

Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the recruitment process. If you require any accommodation, please let us know and we will work with you to provide the necessary support.