About Fat Zebra
At Fat Zebra, we simplify payments so merchants and platforms can scale with confidence. Our flexible, secure, and scalable payments platform supports over 100,000 merchants across Australia and New Zealand, helping them navigate the complexity of the payments ecosystem so they can focus on what matters most — growing their business.
About the Role
At Fat Zebra, we build and maintain monoliths and service-oriented systems. Much of our architecture is event-driven, reflecting the asynchronous nature of real-world payments and settlements. We value simplicity, strong interfaces, and observability and we continuously refine our systems to be more robust and scalable as we grow.
We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Financial Operations team – responsible for building and maintaining the systems that power Fat Zebra’s settlements, billing, treasury, and core financial operations. This team ensures the secure, accurate, and scalable handling of large transaction volumes across payment rails, internal ledgers, and banking partners.Our work directly supports Fat Zebra’s merchants by ensuring timely and accurate settlement of funds, clear and consistent transaction reporting, and the real-time pricing of transactions. These outcomes are critical to our merchants’ financial visibility and trust in our platform, and they rely on the accuracy and stability of the systems we build.
At Fat Zebra, we build and maintain a blend of monoliths and service-oriented systems. Much of our architecture is event-driven, reflecting the asynchronous nature of real-world payments and settlements. We value simplicity, strong interfaces, and observability and we continuously refine our systems to be more robust and scalable as we grow.
You’ll be joining a focused group that thrives on solving hard problems in distributed systems, data integrity, and financial correctness. Our tech stack is primarily Ruby on Rails, alongside TypeScript, React, Postgres, AWS, to name a few others. While this role involves some full-stack exposure, it is primarily backend-focused, with an emphasis on designing reliable systems that operate at scale and with precision.
Key Responsibilities
- Design and build backend services that power our payment flows — including card processing, account-to-account transfers, settlement, fraud detection, and financial operations with a focus on security, scalability, reliability, and regulatory compliance.
- Participate in the full development lifecycle, from architecture and design through implementation, testing, deployment, and ongoing operations.
- Write well-tested, maintainable code that supports long-term system health and developer productivity.
- Diagnose and resolve issues across services, contributing to incident response and participating in on-call rotations where appropriate.
- Document and share knowledge to help others navigate the complexity of our payment’s ecosystem.
- Collaborate across teams, working closely with engineers, product managers, operations, and partners to shape product direction, define requirements, and deliver solutions.
About You
You have 5+ years of hands-on experience as a software engineer, ideally building and maintaining backend services in a production environment;
- Comfortable working with one or more of our core technologies, especially Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Typescript, or Go and you’re confident picking up new languages and tools as needed.
- You have a strong foundation in software engineering principles, writing maintainable code, designing clean interfaces, building systems that are observable, testable, and resilient.
- Familiar with or curious about event-driven architecture, service-oriented systems and understand the trade-offs of working with distributed components and shared state.
- You’re at ease navigating complexity, whether that’s mapping out payments flow across multiple services, reasoning about concurrency and edge cases, or handling regulatory constraints with care.
- Clear communicator who collaborates well with others, shares context generously, and values team success over ego.
- You take ownership of your work, follow through on commitments, and actively contribute to a culture of reliability, safety, and continuous improvement.
- We’re looking for someone with experience in backend development (ideally with Ruby on Rails or similar programming experience), who enjoys working in a team, solving hard problems and building software that makes a real-world impact.
Essential Information
- Enjoy flexible hybrid working arrangements and a supportive, people-first culture.
- You must have working rights in Australia to apply for this role.
- You must complete an appropriate background check relevant to the role.
- We do not accept candidates from outside Australia for this role.
For a confidential discussion please contact Fat Zebra’s Talent Manager Rose Filippone on
+61 409236061 or apply to the link below.
