Staff Systems Engineer

Job description

**What do we do?** Paddle offers digital product companies a completely different approach to their payment infrastructure. Instead of assembling and maintaining a complex stack of payments-related apps and services, we’re a Merchant of Record for our customers. That means we take away 100% of the pain of payment fragmentation. It’s faster, safer, cheaper, and, above all, way better. We’re backed by investors including KKR, FTV Capital, Kindred, Notion, and 83North and serve over 10,000 software sellers in 245 territories globally. **The Role:** Our InfoSec and IT teams are looking for a Staff Systems Engineer to lead and innovate at the intersection of infrastructure, security, and automation. This is a hands-on, high-impact role for someone who thrives in a digital-first, collaborative environment and is passionate about building resilient, secure, and scalable systems. You’ll be a technical leader across both our InfoSec and IT teams, driving the evolution of our systems landscape in both our Enterprise IT and Product environments. Your work will empower our global team of Paddlers to operate securely and efficiently, while ensuring that our systems not only meet but exceed industry standards. ### **What you’ll do:** - Lead initiatives to automate operational processes, reducing manual effort and increasing reliability, with a focus on scalability and security. - Partner with IT and InfoSec leadership to design, implement, and optimise integrations across business-critical IT and security systems, ensuring seamless connectivity and data flow. - Design, build, and maintain Infrastructure-as-Code for our identity, network, and security tooling, including CI/CD pipelines for safe, auditable change delivery. - Champion compliance with industry best practices and security standards, including CIS Benchmarks, and proactively identify areas for improvement. - Support GRC initiatives on control implementation, audit evidence gathering and unlocking efficiency improvements through the adoption of automation. - Collaborate with stakeholders to deliver projects aligned with the Enterprise Technology roadmap, ensuring measurable impact and timely delivery. - Contribute to the secure configuration and monitoring of our AWS cloud infrastructure and working with the Platform team to ensure security initiatives are delivered in a scalable and reliable manner. - Develop and maintain internal documentation and knowledge bases to ensure consistent, high-quality support and operational excellence. - Mentor and support other engineers across InfoSec, IT and the wider Engineering function, fostering a culture of continuous improvement, knowledge sharing, and technical excellence. ### **Skills & Experience** At Paddle we value a growth mindset and a willingness to learn, so if you're confident in most of these skills (not necessarily all) and you're excited to grow, we encourage you to apply. We’d love to hear from you if you: - Have extensive experience in one or more of systems engineering, site reliability engineering, security engineering, or software development with a strong track record of hands-on delivery in both IT and security domains. - Are comfortable working collaboratively across multiple business functions, and can operate autonomously on high-impact and wide-reaching projects. - Can demonstrate strong knowledge of systems integration and automation, with a passion for reducing operational complexity and driving continuous improvement. - Have awareness of industry standards and frameworks (such as CIS Benchmarks, SOC 2, PCI DSS), and experience implementing compliance controls in real-world environments. - Bring strong cloud security expertise, including identity management, resource configuration, and monitoring. Hands-on experience working with AWS infrastructure, including containerised workloads and cloud-native deployment paradigms is highly desirable. - Are familiar with modern device management, IAM, and EDR solutions (e.g., Okta, Iru, Island, SentinelOne), as well as collaboration and networking tools (e.g., Google Workspace, Slack, Cloudflare Zero Trust). - Have a software engineering background (desirable), with experience in scripting or programming to automate workflows and integrate systems. - Hands-on experience writing and operating Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform strongly preferred) for identity, network, or cloud security systems. - Can communicate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders, and are comfortable influencing at all levels of the business. - Are passionate about security, automation, and operational excellence, and want to make a real impact at scale. **Everyone is welcome at Paddle** At Paddle, we’re committed to removing invisible barriers, both for our customers and within our own teams. We recognise and celebrate that every Paddler is unique and we welcome every individual perspective. As an inclusive employer we don’t care if, or where, you studied, what you look like or where you’re from. We’re more interested in your craft, curiosity, passion for learning and what you’ll add to our culture. We encourage you to apply even if you don’t match every part of the job ad, especially if you’re part of an underrepresented group. Please let us know if there’s anything we can do to better support you through the application process and in the workplace. We will do everything we can to support any accommodations needed. We’re committed to building a diverse team where everyone feels safe to be their authentic self. Let’s grow together. **Our Values** - **Paddle Together** - *“None of us, is as smart as all of us”* - **Paddle Simply** - *“Simple can be harder than complex: you have to get your thinking clean to make it simple”* - **Paddle for others** - *“We can realise our wildest dreams, so long as we help enough other people to realise theirs”* **Why you’ll love working at Paddle** We are a diverse, growing group of Paddlers across the globe who pride ourselves on our transparent, collaborative and respectful culture. We invest in learning and will help you with your personal development via constant exposure to new challenges, an annual learning fund, and regular internal and external training. **Connecting at Paddle** We’re a **‘digital-first’ company**, which means our Paddlers always have the freedom to choose where, when and how they work within our hub locations. We recognize that where our Paddlers do their best work is unique to them and we provide trust and autonomy for everyone to work in a way which fits them best. We also value the power of connection and have invested in global hubs which help local communities flourish and bring us together for focused collaboration. Our Paddle hubs: - **In Europe:** UK (London headquarters), Portugal (Lisbon hub), Netherlands and Ireland (Dublin hub) - **In North America:** Austin, TX (USA) and Toronto (Canada) Our hub philosophy creates an engaging experience for all Paddlers, wherever, whenever and however we choose to work. To support this, we focus hiring within our hubs and will always openly share the available locations for each open position on our job description.