Staff Application Engineer

Staff Application Engineer Your opportunity At Mollie, we aim to deliver effortless payments and money management for every business As we evolve beyond payments into a true money management platform, the Business Account domain is at the center of this transformation We are entering the next phase of growth, and to enable this, we are hiring a Staff Application Engineer at the domain level. This is a highly strategic and deeply technical role reporting directly into our Director of Engineering, with impact spanning multiple teams The main challenges for this role are setting a best-in-class backend architecture foundation that supports the existing product areas in the Business Account domain, contributes to the overall engineering vision (such as cloud migration and monolith decomposition), and enables effective and efficient integrations with other domains or third-party vendors This role is about building the systems that enable everyone else to build faster. What you’ll be doing As a Staff Engineer, you will operate as the domain-wide technical authority for our backend architecture Your responsibilities will include: - Owning Mollie’s architecture at the deepest level, ensuring long-term scalability, performance, and maintainability - Setting the vision and strategy for a scalable architecture for the whole Business Accounts domain, with long-term thinking and a pragmatic approach for an iterative implementation of it - Driving technical strategic decisions in cross-functional teams and leading cross-cutting tech initiatives within the domain - Defining the standards, patterns, and best practices that will allow Mollie to scale development across many teams without fragmentation - Actively seeking out bottlenecks to our efficiency as a team, proposing and coordinating solutions that will enable the entire team to iterate faster - Partnering with engineering leaders across domains to enable distributed feature ownership while maintaining a coherent platform - Mentoring engineers and acting as a multiplier across the organization through coaching, design reviews, hands-on pair programming, PoC development, and technology scouting Our architecture Mollie’s ecosystem spans multiple applications, and this role will be foundational in shaping how Mollie builds backend software at scale for the next decade Our stack includes: - Backend: Primarily Java and PHP, deployed in Google Cloud - Infrastructure: Service-based architecture, supported by queueing systems - Developer Experience: Strong investment in internal tooling, CI/CD, and platform consistency What you’ll bring We are looking for an exceptional engineer with deep backend expertise and proven Staff-level leadership: - 15+ years of professional software engineering experience - Strong experience in Java and/or PHP designing, building, and scaling distributed systems - Experience with event-driven architectures and migration trajectories - Proven experience building platform foundations or shared frameworks that enable other teams - Must have led/coordinated teams of engineers to deliver autonomously on large cross-functionally driven projects - Strong understanding of testing, release safety, observability, and operational excellence - Ability to influence across teams and domains, aligning engineering leaders around shared standards - Track record of mentoring senior engineers and driving organization-wide technical change - Experience operating in high-reliability or regulated environments (fintech experience is a plus)