Staff Engineer (backend oriented - python)

Why join Tipalti?

Tipalti is the AI-powered platform for finance automation, elevating how finance teams operate in the global economy. We empower our customers to scale faster and smarter by removing the complexities of doing global business and accelerating their finance operations efficiency. Our platform provides a comprehensive suite of finance automation solutions designed for mid-market businesses across accounts payable, global payouts, procurement, employee expenses, corporate cards, supplier management, tax compliance, and treasury. Tipalti partners with leading financial institutions such as Citi, Wells Fargo, J.P. Morgan, and Visa, enabling over 5,000 global companies to efficiently and securely pay millions of suppliers and payees across 200+ countries and territories, in 120 currencies.

At Tipalti, we pride ourselves on our collaborative culture, the quality of our product and the capabilities of our people. Tipaltians are passionate about the work they do, and keen to get the job done. Tipalti offers competitive benefits, a flexible workplace, career coaching, and an environment where diverse individuals can thrive and make an impact. Our culture ensures everyone checks their egos at the door and stands ready to reach for success together. 

Founded in Israel in 2010, Tipalti is a global business headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area (Foster City) with offices in Tel Aviv, Plano, Toronto, Vancouver, London, Amsterdam, Tbilisi and Medellin.

In this role, you will be responsible for:

• Platform Evolution: Increase enrichment accuracy and coverage by evolving data processing logic and adding new capabilities.
• Performance Engineering: Reduce processing latency and improve throughput by designing efficient message-driven pipelines.
• API & Schema Design: Maintain clear, stable service interfaces (HTTP/gRPC) and schemas with strong backward compatibility.
• Data Modeling & Querying: Model data and write efficient Postgres queries; strategically use vectors/embeddings where they add value.
• Tooling: Build internal analytics/debugging tools to accelerate triage and insight for engineering and operations teams.
• Quality & Standards: Raise the quality bar through component/integration/snapshot tests, thorough code reviews, documentation, and release hygiene.
• Observability: Instrument services fully by shipping meaningful metrics and logs, and using dashboards to troubleshoot and proactively improve reliability

About you

We are looking for a highly motivated Staff Engineer with a strong sense of ownership, eager to tackle technical challenges in a high-throughput data processing environment.

Must-haves:

• Core Backend Expertise: Strong Python 5+ backend experience, including building production services with a focus on clean code and maintainability.
• Asynchronous Systems: Experience with message-driven systems (e.g., AWS SQS or similar) and background workers.
• Database Proficiency: Solid SQL and Postgres fundamentals; comfort with schema evolution and performance basics.
• API & Protocols: Service API fundamentals: HTTP and gRPC; awareness of protobuf/versioning and backward compatibility practices.
• DevOps Comfort: Familiarity with CI/CD as a user (e.g., GitHub Actions) and comfortable with branch-based test environments.
• Operational Mindset: Strong observability mindset: the ability to add metrics, read logs/dashboards, and debug issues systematically.
• Testing Discipline: Confident with testing (pytest, component/integration tests, snapshot testing) and confident in refactoring existing code.
• Ownership: Demonstrated end-to-end responsibility for a platform area and effective collaboration with adjacent teams (Application, Data Science).

• Applied Data/ML Engineering: Practical experience with pandas, scikit-learn, onnxruntime, numba, and production inference experience.
• Vector/Similarity: Practical work with embeddings/similarity (e.g., pgvector) for grouping and search functionalities.
• Internal Tools: Experience building internal analytics tools (e.g., Streamlit) for triage and insight.
• Advanced gRPC: Deeper gRPC/protobuf practices, including schema evolution strategies and performance tuning.
• Security in Data: Experience with security/privacy in data-heavy domains (PII handling, secrets hygiene, auditing best practices).
• Domain Knowledge: Experience integrating with ERP systems or financial data sources.

Our tech teams are the engine behind our business. Tipalti’s tech ecosystem is extremely rich and we continually add new features to our products, ensuring that we respond to our clients’ needs at scale. Our tech teams retain a fast-paced, start-up vibe that encourages innovation and critical thinking. At Tipalti, you’ll have the opportunity to work with a diverse, global team of engineers, developers and product leaders who are collectively building the future of our best-in-class product suite as we transform financial operations for the future.

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