Staff Infrastructure Engineer

About VGS

VGS is the world's leader in payment tokenization, trusted by the most innovative AI and Fortune 500 companies, merchants, banks, and fintechs to power modern payments and agentic commerce.

We tokenize over 9 billion tokens and process more than 10 billion monthly interactions, touching a third of all e-commerce. That scale isn't incidental. It's why leading companies embed our universal token vault and credential management platform directly into their stack, taming the complexity of payment data so they can move faster.

We’re helping businesses unlock new possibilities in an industry that never stops moving. And that takes exceptional people.

Trusted Engineering That Matters

Engineering at VGS

Our vision is clear: VGS is building the platform powering agentic commerce and global payments infrastructure. VGS Engineering is the pillar that supports that vision. We create a platform that is an indispensable, ubiquitous component of our partners' payments and security infrastructure. To achieve this, we build and operate high-scale, reliable, and resilient systems that manage mission-critical payment data across the globe. We don't just participate in the payments ecosystem; we power it.

Our Environment & Culture

• Tooling as Leverage for Impact: We value speed and impact. To ensure nothing slows you down, we arm you with a highly consistent modern stack (e.g. AWS, Kubernetes, Java, TypeScript, Python) and world-class AI-augmented SDLC tooling. We strip away the friction so you can focus on building simple things that work, pushing boundaries, and delivering value faster.

• Impact Over Input: Scaling global payments infrastructure requires individuals who take personal ownership of outcomes from day one. We look for builders who combine high agency with deep strategic alignment; channeling their urgency and relentless iteration into what matters most. Leading from the front means multiplying the impact of those around you so we win collectively.

• Mission-Critical Accountability: We power payments infrastructure for global market leaders, making system trust and integrity our core deliverable. We don't treat compliance (PCI, SOC2, ISO27001), security patching, and platform maintenance as administrative overhead—we engineer them with first-class product discipline. We apply the same rigor, roadmap thinking, and speed to system health as we do to new features. In high-scale payments, reliability isn't background work; it is our product.

About the Role

As a Staff Infrastructure Engineer, you will serve as a technical leader on our Platform Engineering team. You will architect, scale, and fortify global cloud infrastructure designed to handle mission-critical, high-throughput payments applications with zero downtime.

You will take ownership of key platform foundations powering our core payments infrastructure. Rather than executing against a rigid task list or holding blanket ownership over the entire platform, you will drive the technical strategy, architecture, and reliability standards for your designated domains within our multi-region AWS environment. We are looking for high-agency engineers who want to own complex distributed system challenges end-to-end and elevate how the entire engineering team operates.

If you thrive on solving complex distributed systems problems, building automated resiliency, and driving modern SRE practices, we want to build the future with you.

What You'll Do

• Build Immutable, Self-Healing Systems: Design, build, and optimize multi-region, high-availability AWS infrastructure. You will drive our evolution from hand-crafted environments to a standardized, globally scalable fleet managed entirely through code.

• Drive Resiliency & Automation: Replace manual toil with self-healing, automated infrastructure using GitOps, modern CI/CD pipelines, and IaC.

• Deep Observability & Resiliency: Build end-to-end telemetry (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) to proactively spot bottlenecks. You will own incident management and conduct blameless post-mortems to continuously harden our reliability baseline.

• Force-Multiply Engineering Velocity: Partner closely with Product, Security, and Core Engineering teams and lead from the front by designing "Golden Paths" that strip away friction for feature teams. You will influence company-wide engineering practices and mentor the organization on how to move fast with high alignment.

• Customer Impact: Architect and operate high-performance, low-latency private connectivity to optimize the experience for external customers. Partner strategically with internal engineering teams at the design and architectural level for platform enablement and adoption.

What You Bring

• Ownership at Scale: 8+ years of experience taking personal ownership of outcomes in complex, large-scale distributed systems within mission-critical environments.

• AWS & Infrastructure-as-Code: Advanced proficiency in AWS ecosystems leveraging Terraform to build reproducible environments.

• Containerization & Orchestration: Strong, hands-on experience with Kubernetes (EKS), Docker, and GitOps workflows (Flux, Argo, GitHub Actions).

• Automation & Scripting: Strong coding skills in Python, Go, or Bash to automate infrastructure and build operational tools.

• Observability Expertise: Deep experience implementing Prometheus, Grafana, or OpenTelemetry at scale.

• Security & Networking Foundations: Solid understanding of cloud security, API Gateways, load balancing, and network isolation, viewing security as a fundamental engineering constraint, not an afterthought.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with tokenization, payment processing, cryptology, or security products

• BA/BS degree

• A knack for out-of-the-box thinking that thrives in a fast-paced startup environment

• Experience managing distributed data streaming platforms like Kafka (MSK).

• Database performance tuning and query optimization skills.

• Familiarity with Java / Spring Framework services.

What We Look For In Every Teammate

We're looking for passionate professionals who take pride in their craft and want to help grow a team tackling some of the most critical problems in payments. People who thrive here are curious by nature, unafraid of hard problems, and motivated by the chance to build something that matters at scale.

If you're driven to make a meaningful impact, work at the leading edge of payment technology, and grow your career alongside a team that values ownership, collaboration, and continuous learning, you'll feel right at home at VGS.

How We Work

At VGS, we embrace a remote-first philosophy because we believe flexibility leads to great work and a healthy work-life balance. That said, if you live within 30 miles of one of our office locations, you'll be on a hybrid schedule with some in-person time, because we know there's real value in coming together.

We're not about being in the office every day. We are about connection, collaboration, and the energy that comes from a great brainstorm, a team lunch, or celebrating a big win in person.

Our Benefits

Financial and retirement

• Competitive salary

• 401 (k) with a 4% match and immediate vesting (applies to US only)

• Early equity

• Internet Stipend

• Learning Stipend

• Office set-up stipend (applies to US only)

Health and Wellness

• Insurance (medical, dental, and vision)

• HSA/FSA Options

• Life and disability insurance

• Pet insurance

Vacation and time off

• Unlimited PTO

• Paid national holidays

• Global parental leave program

Professional Development

• Promote from within

• Lunch and learns

• Team events and summits

Office life and perks

• Remote and hybrid opportunities

• Flexible working hours

• Weekly office lunches

• Employee discount platform

Equal Opportunity

We consider all applicants without regard to race, color, national origin, sex, age, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, marital status, physical or mental disability, or other protected classes under all applicable local, state, and federal laws and ordinances (AA/EOE/W/M/Vet/Disabled).

Qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records will be considered for this position in accordance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.

Where We're Hiring

We are currently hiring in the following locations: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Ontario (Canada), Alberta (Canada), and British Columbia (Canada).

A Note on Our Hiring Process