Principal Engineer

About the role

At PPRO, we simplify access to local payments - providing a local payments platform that empowers giants like PayPal, Stripe, and Microsoft to connect with billions of consumers worldwide. We are on an ambitious, fast-paced mission to 3x our growth by 2028 - and we’re just getting started. Our magic lies in our team of proud payments nerds. Spanning over 50 nationalities across 10+ global locations, our diverse cultures aren't a checklist; they are the competitive advantage driving our innovation. This is a people-first, high trust environment where you’ll have the autonomy to make a massive impact, own your work end-to-end, and grow through broad exposure, meaningful challenges, and continuous learning. We get things done, challenge respectfully, put the customer first, and recognise that our biggest successes are those we create as a team. If you’re ready to leave your footprint on global commerce, join us. The Purpose: As a Principal Individual Contributor (L8), your mission is to advance PPRO’s global payments platform by driving deep technical understanding and architectural innovation across the entire organization. This is a free-floating, non-domain-specific role focused on technology principles and creating scalable, reliable, robust solutions, directly impacting PPRO’s market leadership and long-term strategy. Your impact will be as follow: We act with Trust and Integrity. Act as a technical multiplier, leveling up engineering teams and fostering a culture of deep technical excellence. Define and consistently apply organization-wide engineering principles and best practices, partnering with cross-functional teams (Product, Partnerships, Security, Compliance) to ensure solutions meet standards for resilience, reliability, and business alignment. Ensure engineering principles and best practices are consistently defined and applied organization-wide, championing high standards for resilience and reliability. Help to design and develop scalable, reliable and high-performing systems using our core technologies Java/Kotlin in the AWS ecosystem. We make things better Drive continuous improvement and technical strategies with a focus on impact and initiative rather than bureaucracy. Own the technical advisory group where RFCs around end-to-end code quality, deployment processes, and monitoring in production environments are being discussed and decided on. Advocate for continuous improvement, driving decisions through data and metrics to align engineering outcomes with business goals. We get things done Pioneer technical strategies that position PPRO as a leader in payments innovation. Ensure sustainable, high-velocity delivery while maintaining system reliability and performance excellence. What would make you a great fit Broad technological fluency with substantial experience in the JVM ecosystem (Java/Kotlin). Recent and meaningful experience with languages like Golang or Python is also acceptable. Proven experience designing and building distributed systems, microservices, and event-driven architectures. Expertise in Java/Kotlin development and AWS services (e.g., EKS, Kinesis, SQS, DynamoDB, RDS). Strong technical leadership skills with a track record of mentoring and guiding engineering teams. Ability to communicate complex technical concepts effectively to technical and non-technical audiences. A mindset focused on driving tangible impact and taking initiative. Background in API security standards and data handling best practices. Nice-to-haves Experience in the payments industry, including familiarity with PCI-DSS compliance and payment gateways. What's in it for you? Hybrid working - We offer a hybrid structure with a 3 days / week on site expectation, so you can strike the balance between office and home working. In addition to our 30-day holiday allowance, we also provide a work from abroad policy, enabling employees to work remotely for up to another 30 days per year. L

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