Very Good Security · San Francisco
Software EngineeringR&DRemoteFull Time
VGS is building the trust infrastructure for a new era of commerce. As commerce becomes agentic, payments are increasing dramatically in volume, speed, and complexity, and the companies driving that shift need a foundation they can fully trust.
That's where VGS comes in. We're 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 store more than 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.
Come build the platform that enables modern payments for the world's largest companies. 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
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. 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
Modern Tooling as Leverage: 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 the problems that demand creativity and judgment.
Ownership of Outcomes: 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.
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. In payments infrastructure, reliability is not background work, it’s part of what customers buy.
Learn More: See how our engineering practices drive trust and innovation in our official blog and our reliability practices.
As a Senior Software Engineer on the Core Services team, you will build and scale the foundation of our payments and tokenization platform. We process high-stakes financial data, which means our systems require zero downtime. You will own the core services every other engineering team relies on, including authentication, authorization, audit logging, and observability.
You won't be handed rigid task lists or wait for top-down instructions. Instead, you'll partner with product and engineering leaders to solve messy technical challenges and build bulletproof infrastructure. We want high-agency builders who hate manual toil, move fast using modern AI developer tools, and take pride in shipping scalable, secure distributed systems.
Build Core Services: Design and optimize fast, highly available Java microservices that power our core platform.
Ship Faster with AI: Actively use AI-augmented developer tools to eliminate friction, automate boilerplate, write better tests, and multiply your team’s daily output.
Automate Everything: Eliminate manual toil. Build self-healing systems using GitOps, modern CI/CD pipelines, and Infrastructure-as-Code.
Own Observability & Operations: Use Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry to catch bottlenecks before they break things. You will participate in on-call rotations and when incidents happen, you will lead blameless post-mortems so we never fail the same way twice. Enable Engineering Velocity: Partner with cross-functional teams to build and adopt "Golden Paths" that streamline software delivery. You will mentor other engineers and set a high bar for code quality and testing.
Deliver Product Impact: Own your services end-to-end. Balance the need for strict security and low latency with the goal of making internal platform adoption seamless for other developers.
Ownership at Scale: 5+ years of software engineering experience where you owned features end-to-end in complex, high-throughput distributed systems.
Java & Microservices Expertise: Proficiency in Java (Spring/Spring Boot), REST APIs, and microservice design patterns.
Data & Messaging: Hands-on experience with event-driven architecture (Kafka, SQS) and tuning relational databases for performance.
Cloud-Native & Containers: Strong experience deploying and running containerized apps (Docker, Kubernetes/EKS) in the cloud (AWS preferred).
Security Mindset: You know how to write secure code, design secure APIs, and operate smoothly within highly regulated environments (PCI-DSS, SOC2).
High Agency: You're curious; You don’t wait for detailed Jira tickets. You ask hard questions, hunt down missing context, and take the initiative to solve complex problems end-to-end without needing your hand held.
Nice to Have:
Experience with tokenization, payment processing, or security products
BA/BS degree
A knack for out-of-the-box thinking that thrives in a fast-paced startup environment
Direct experience with proxy architecture or tokenization technologies.
You already rely heavily on AI developer tools in your daily engineering workflow.
Proven track record of performance tuning or network proxy optimization in high-concurrency production environments.