Staff Software Engineer

About Blackhawk Network: Today, through BHN’s single global platform, businesses of all kinds can tap into the world’s largest network of branded payment solutions. BHN helps businesses grow revenue, increase loyalty, motivate and reward their teams, disburse funds and engage consumers. Branded payment solutions include the issuance and distribution of gift cards, egifts, corporate payouts and rewards, along with the technology to deliver these products in seamless, integrated ways. BHN’s network spans the globe with more than 400,000 consumer touchpoints. Learn more at BHN.com.

Overview: We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our core platform engineering team. In this senior individual-contributor role, you will shape platform architecture, simplify complex integration landscapes, and lead modernization across a broad microservice ecosystem . You will partner with engineering leads, product managers, and architects to defin e technical vision across multiple systems, influencing roadmaps across teams, driving multi-quarter initiatives, raising engineering standards, and improving platform reliability, scalability, security, and developer effectiveness across the organization to help ship systems that handle millions of transactions per day.

Responsibilities:

• Architect, design, and implement highly available , fault-tolerant microservices using Java and Spring Boot deployed on AWS.
• Lead the technical design of distributed systems including event-driven architectures, service mesh patterns, and asynchronous processing pipelines.
• Define caching strategies using Redis (Cluster / Sentinel) to optimize latency and throughput across high-traffic payment flows.
• Drive database design and optimization across relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (DynamoDB, Cassandra) datastores, including sharding, indexing, and query performance tuning.
• Champion engineering best practices: code reviews, test-driven development, CI/CD pipelines, observability (metrics, logging, tracing), and incident retrospectives.
• Collaborate with architects to evaluate and adopt AWS-native services (EKS, Lambda, SQS, SNS, RDS, ElastiCache , API Gateway) for scalable, cost-effective solutions.
• Mentor and coach engineers across levels, providing technical guidance, design feedback, and career development support.
• Partner with Product and Business stakeholders to translate complex requirements into robust technical plans with clear milestones.
• Contribute to long-term platform roadmap decisions, including build-vs-buy evaluations, technology migrations, and capacity planning.
• Identify and drive resolution of systemic reliability, performance, and security issues across services.
• Use AI-assisted approaches responsibly to accelerate large-scale framework upgrades, reduce manual effort, and improve migration repeatability across services and libraries.
• Act as a technical multiplier through design reviews, mentorship, implementation guidance, operational rigor, and clear technical communication across teams.

Qualifications:

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience with a strong backend focus.
• Expert-level proficiency in Java (Java 11+), including concurrency, JVM tuning, and modern frameworks such as Spring Boot and Spring Cloud.
• Deep experience designing and operating microservices in production — service decomposition, API contracts (REST / gRPC ), versioning, and inter-service communication patterns.
• Strong command of distributed systems concepts: CAP theorem, eventual consistency, leader election, distributed transactions, and saga patterns.
• Hands-on AWS experience with services including EC2, EKS/ECS, RDS, DynamoDB, SQS/SNS, ElastiCache , CloudWatch, and IAM.
• Proficiency with Redis — caching patterns, TTL strategies, pub/sub, Lua scripting, and cluster management.
• Solid database expertise across both SQL and NoSQL — schema design, query optimization, connection pooling, and data modeling .
• Experience with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes) in a production environment.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or similar) and Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform or CloudFormation).
• Strong communication skills — able to articulate technical trade-offs to both engineering and non-engineering audiences. Preferred Qualifications:
• Experience in fintech, payments, gift cards, or high-volume e-commerce platforms.
• Knowledge of PCI-DSS compliance requirements and secure coding practices in payment systems.
• Familiarity with event streaming platforms such as Apache Kafka or AWS Kinesis.
• Contributions to open-source projects or published technical writing.
• AWS certifications (Solutions Architect, Developer, or DevOps Engineer) are a plus. We seek candidates who not only demonstrate curiosity and adaptability in emerging technologies but have also successfully implemented and utilized AI tools to enhance their work, improve processes, or deliver measurable results. Our teams embrace continuous learning and the thoughtful integration of AI to create meaningful impact – for our employees and the future of work.