Staff Engineer (Payments, AU)

About EatClub

At EatClub, we believe restaurants and bars are the beating heart of every city’s culture. Whether it's discovering a hidden gem, grabbing a late-night takeaway, or meeting friends for a drink, our mission is simple: help the hospitality industry thrive through smart, powerful tech.

Our platform helps over 4 million customers discover top restaurants and access real-time deals that save them up to 50% off the bill. We empower more than 8,000 venues to fill empty tables, increase foot traffic, and maximise revenue.

#1 app in Food & Drink and awarded Australia's Fastest Growing Tech Company by the AFR in 2025. Now is an exciting time to join our team. Initially co-founded by Marco Pierre White and leaders in the food tech scene, we're now a 200+ person scaleup that's growing fast and making waves in the industry.

Why You’ll Love Working With Us

• Be part of an innovative company shaping the future of dining
• Autonomy, flexibility, high-performing, and a collaborative culture
• A passionate team who values creativity, hustle and results
• Access to some of the best restaurants and hospitality leaders in the industry
• Staff discounts and dining vouchers to enjoy through EatClub

A Day-in-a-Life of our Staff Engineer, Payments

As our Staff Engineer, Payments, you bring deep payments expertise to the squad that moves money through EatClub: from the customer's tap at a venue, through our payment partners, to the venue being paid. Working closely with the squad's tech lead, you will help shape the technical direction of our payments platform across Australia, the UK and New Zealand, lead the design of its most complex and consequential pieces, and stay hands-on in the code. You are the engineer we put in front of our payment partners, banks and card schemes when the conversation gets technical, and a trusted voice when the business needs to understand a payments trade-off. You will also help us prepare for the next stage of our payments strategy as we grow. This is a hands-on technical leadership role, not a people-management role and not a slide-deck architecture role.

On any given week, you will be:

• Partnering with the product manager and the tech lead on the direction of our payments platform and helping turn it into a roadmap the business can plan around
• Leading the design of our hardest payment problems and explaining the trade-offs in plain language
• Representing the squad in technical conversations with our payment partners, acquirers and card schemes
• Introducing an external perspective on industry best practices for payments and helping the team implement them
• Strengthening our reliability, risk and compliance posture at the platform level
• Writing production code on the most consequential changes, reviewing the rest, and raising the bar for the engineers around you
• Contributing payments expertise to the CPTO and tech lead on where our payments capability goes next

Projects you'll be working on at EatClub...

Sample initiatives you may lead:

• Helping establish a single, documented source of truth for how our payments work, and the practices that keep it current
• Leading the design of improvements to core payment flows that lift approval rates, reliability and customer experience
• Strengthening our ledger and settlement foundations so money is accounted for correctly, end to end
• Shaping a payments architecture that treats Australia, the UK and New Zealand as first-class markets
• Designing reusable integration patterns for our bank and loyalty partners
• Contributing to the technical path for the next stage of our card and payments strategy

You have….

• At least 8 years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years building production payment systems at a fintech, payments company, acquirer, issuer, scheme or bank
• A track record of leading the design of significant payments work and carrying it through to production
• Deep, practical understanding of card payments and the behaviour of schemes, acquirers and payment providers in the real world
• Experience designing ledgers, settlement and reconciliation systems where correctness is measured in cents
• Strong backend engineering in a modern language on cloud infrastructure, with the judgement to know when a design is good enough to ship
• Working knowledge of PCI DSS and of designing systems that minimise compliance scope
• Experience leading incident response for payment systems and reducing incident load through structural change
• A record of making the engineers around you better through design reviews and mentoring
• Credibility with executives and external partners: you can explain a payments trade-off to a CEO, a bank and a scheme and be understood by all three
• Fluency with AI development tools and judgement about where they help and where they mislead
• Great familiarity with Idempotency and duplicate handling.

It would be extra awesome if you also had…

• Card issuing or issuer-processor experience
• Scar tissue from a high-growth fintech, neobank, BNPL or payments company that scaled under real volume and regulatory scrutiny
• Familiarity with the Australian payments landscape, and with UK, New Zealand and US schemes
• Experience with a serverless AWS stack and event-driven systems
• Exposure to fraud and risk platforms, or to QSAs and ISO 27001 programmes
• Experience in a two-sided marketplace or hospitality tech
• Experience with migrating a live financial system. i.e cutting over without breaking anything.
• Safely changing legacy code on a money path in a complex codebase.
• Architecting transaction authorisation under a strict time limit

You are…

• You are a builder with scars. You have seen payments break at scale and you know what "correct" actually costs.
• You are rigorous about money. A cent out of place bothers you, and you design systems so it cannot happen twice.
• You influence through expertise, not title. You bring the strongest argument in the room and change your mind when someone brings a better one.
• You are a good partner to a tech lead. You make their job easier, not harder, and you know the difference between leading a design and running a team.
• You are comfortable at the boundary. You can hold a technical conversation with a bank, a scheme or an auditor and come back with an answer.
• You are a force multiplier. You measure yourself by how much better the squad gets, not by how indispensable you become.
• You are commercially literate. You understand that approval rates and settlement timing are revenue, not just metrics.

If you do a good job…

• There is one agreed truth about how EatClub moves money, and every engineer can find it.
• Our payments platform is reliable, well understood and ready for the next market and the next partner before they ask.
• Payment incidents are rare and structurally fixed, and the squad spends its time building.
• The tech lead and the business can see the path to the next stage of our payments strategy, and trust the engineering behind it.
• The engineers around you are much better at payments than they were, and the knowledge survives any one person leaving, including you.

Maybe this role is not for you if….

• You want to set direction without writing code, or write code without shaping direction. This role is both.
• You need to be the final word. This squad has a tech lead, and you will do your best work alongside them.
• You are a strong generalist who has touched payments but never gone deep on a payments platform in production.
• You prefer the structure and predictability of a large bank, clear playbooks, and unchanging priorities over a fast-moving environment.
• You are looking for a people-management role; this is a technical leadership role.

If you're curious about what we're building, you're welcome to explore EatClub ahead of your interview. First-time users who choose to give it a try can use the code "ECAPPLY5" for an optional $5 voucher to test the experience. This is entirely voluntary and has no impact on your application or interview process.

One last note: even if you feel that you don’t meet all the criteria above, we encourage you to apply. Past work experience is not the only indicator of future success, and we are on the look out for hungry talent who wants to grow with us. So if you want to be a part of something remarkable, then we’re excited to hear from you.