Sr. Software Engineer, Payments

Job Title: Sr. Software Engineer, Payments

Team: Product

Location: Onsite - Santa Monica, CA

Employment Type: Full-time, Salaried, Exempt

Reports To: Head of Engineering

About Plug

Plug is an automotive fintech startup building the marketplace for electric vehicles. Consumers, dealers, and commercial partners trade in, sell, and auction used EVs through a platform built exclusively for electric, with nothing adapted from legacy automotive.

Consumers can get an instant cash offer in minutes, backed by data-driven pricing, battery state-of-health analysis, with pickup, payment, and title transfer handled end-to-end. Franchise and independent dealers across the United States bid in real time on inventory sourced directly from these consumers, dealers, and commercial partners. The result is a single platform that gives sellers a fast, fair exit and gives dealers a dedicated channel for sourcing used EV inventory.

Founded in 2023 and led by former Tesla executives, Plug has facilitated $100M in EV sales since launch and is backed by a $20M Series A from Lightspeed Venture Partners. We're building the most AI-native startup team in Los Angeles, full of operators, engineers, and ML researchers laying the transaction rails for the used EV market's exponential growth.

Why Plug

• You'll own a piece of the biggest infrastructure opportunity in automotive.

• You'll work on a platform built exclusively for EVs, with nothing adapted from legacy automotive.

• You'll be part of an AI-native company. We're rethinking how work gets done at a fundamental level.

• You'll work directly with operators who have scaled multi-billion dollar businesses in automotive, EV, and marketplaces.

• You'll have real ownership, high autonomy, and a direct line to company outcomes.

The Opportunity

We are looking for a Sr. Software Engineer to own Plug's payment infrastructure - end to end and to work on other aspects of the business as well. You'll architect how money moves through our two-sided marketplace, primarily over ACH: dealers paying Plug for auction wins ($10K-$100K+ per transaction, averaging ~$25K), dealer floorplan financing, Plug paying consumers and consignors when we acquire their vehicle, and platform fee capture at settlement.

You'll help with vendor selection, partner with the payments PM on KYC/KYB onboarding flow, design the reconciliation systems our Finance team depends on, and own the technical compliance posture for ACH processing at scale, partnering with the PM on regulatory and licensing requirements. You'll report to our head of engineering and work directly with our SVP Product & Technology and VP Finance as primary stakeholders.

You'll work in close partnership with a payments PM, jointly owning Plug's payment rails: the PM owns financial logic, specs, and the finance relationship; you own implementation, infrastructure, and reliability.

What You’ll Do

Payments

• Lead the technical design and implementation of Plug's payment solution across consumer and businesses: KYC / KYB onboarding, ACH pay-in and pay-out rails, card acceptance, platform fee capture, and settlement reconciliation.

• Participate in the vendor selection process - evaluate solutions such as Stripe Connect, Modern Treasury. Possibly create PoC builds. Provide analysis documents.

• Design, implement, test, debug, and document payment features ensuring correctness, idempotency, and auditability - where "mostly works" is not acceptable when money is moving.

• Take ownership of features end-to-end, evaluating effort, risk, and priority in an agile environment with Finance and Product as key internal stakeholders.

Engineering

• Collaborate with colleagues and be a strong voice in product and architecture design sessions.

• Use agentic coding tools to write clear, efficient, and scalable code with an eye toward flexibility and maintainability.

• Own and contribute to team productivity and process improvements, including bringing payments domain knowledge to the broader team.

• Actively raise the technical bar through thoughtful code review, pairing, and knowledge sharing - including how you use AI tools.

What You’ll Bring

• 5+ years of hands-on experience developing and delivering production applications; 3+ years of payments experience.

• Demonstrated experience implementing payment flows in production involving ACH/wire/real-time payments, marketplace split settlements, wallets, for benefit of (FBO) accounts, or platform payouts.

• Understanding of ACH mechanics (return codes, NACHA authorization, account validation), and KYC/KYB processes (UBO identification, OFAC screening)

• Demonstrated proficiency in TypeScript across the full stack - backend, frontend, PostgreSQL schema design for financial data, and API/webhook integrations.

• Temporal or comparable durable workflow experience is a strong plus.

• Experience designing idempotent systems and working with double-entry ledger concepts - can speak to exactly-once semantics and reconciliation schema design.

• Hands-on experience deploying and operating cloud-hosted applications; comfort with infrastructure-as-code (we use Terraform), CI/CD pipelines, and observability tooling.

• Operates in agent-first development workflows - comfortable orchestrating multiple agents, defining clear acceptance criteria, and reviewing AI-generated output with a high quality bar.

• Prior startup experience and a track record of owning work end-to-end: scoping, shipping, and measuring impact. Authorized to work in the US for any employer.

Compensation and Benefits

Annual salary: $185,000 to $215,000

Salary ranges reflect independent, third-party benchmarking against national compensation data. Where an individual's actual offer falls within that range depends on a combination of factors, including relevant experience, specialized skills, training and qualifications, current business needs, and prevailing market conditions. Ranges are reviewed periodically and may be adjusted to reflect changing market conditions.

Benefits:

• Health, vision, and dental insurance

• Daily lunch stipend

• Eligibility for equity/stock options, based on role and performance

• Opportunities for growth and development

This full-time position is based in Sawtelle (between Santa Monica and West Los Angeles) and is an in-person role. We welcome candidates from all locations to apply, provided they are willing to relocate for the role. Relocation assistance will not be provided for successful candidates. Sponsorship not available at this time.

Acknowledgments

Plug is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We believe diverse teams build better products - full stop.