About The Company

PayNearMe is a pioneering payments technology company dedicated to simplifying the way businesses and their customers manage transactions. Our innovative platform, PayXM™, is designed to streamline the entire payment experience, offering a seamless, fast, and secure process for various payment methods including cards, ACH transfers, digital wallets such as PayPal, Venmo, Cash App Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and cash payments at over 62,000 retail locations nationwide. With a team of over 300 employees across 41 states, headquartered in Silicon Valley and with satellite offices in Dallas, TX, and Holmdel, NJ, we serve diverse industries such as consumer lending, iGaming, online sports betting, property management, and tolling. Our mission is to enhance customer satisfaction, accelerate payments, and reduce operational costs through cutting-edge technology and exceptional service.

About The Role

We are seeking a highly experienced Staff Software Engineer specializing in Agent Architecture to join our remote team. In this role, you will own the end-to-end architecture and implementation of agentic AI products that interact with our customers across various modalities, including voice and chat. These agents operate on top of our core money-movement platform, which handles real funds within highly regulated environments, requiring strict compliance, safety, and predictability. The ideal candidate will have a proven track record of shipping scalable, reliable agent systems to production, and will play a critical role in defining how we build, evaluate, and operate these agents. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams to develop frameworks, integration patterns, guardrails, and observability tools, ensuring that our AI agents meet the highest standards of security, compliance, and performance. This position offers an exciting opportunity to influence the future of AI-driven payment solutions and to work on complex, high-stakes systems that directly impact our customers' financial operations.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with a focus on large-scale systems and AI applications
• Proven experience shipping agentic AI systems to production environments
• Hands-on experience with modern agent frameworks such as LangGraph or comparable tools
• Deep understanding of the full agent lifecycle: prompt and tool design, offline and online evaluation, observability, and feedback integration
• Strong system design fundamentals including reliability, data modeling, and API/service boundary management
• Comfort working within Ruby on Rails and MySQL environments, with the ability to adapt quickly
• Excellent communication skills and judgment in high-stakes, cross-functional settings
• Ability to balance high-level architecture with hands-on implementation and coding
  
  

Responsibilities

• Own the architectural vision and strategic direction for agentic AI at PayNearMe, ensuring alignment with business and technical goals
• Design, develop, and deploy production-grade voice and chat agents that integrate seamlessly with existing systems and partner services
• Define and implement frameworks, integration patterns, and guardrails to ensure safety, compliance, and robustness of agents handling real funds
• Make critical decisions on the use of different AI models and technologies, including LLMs, RAG, deterministic logic, and classical ML, based on cost, latency, and accuracy considerations
• Develop and manage the agent lifecycle, including testing, evaluation, observability, versioning, and rollout strategies such as canary deployments and shadow mode
• Optimize the economic aspects of agent interactions, including token budgets, caching, model cascades, and per-tenant cost attribution
• Implement safety guardrails, scope enforcement, consent management, and deterministic handoff procedures to ensure secure and compliant operations
• Design voice modality features, addressing latency, turn-taking, error handling, and telephony-specific considerations
• Collaborate with Security, Compliance, and Legal teams to meet regulatory standards such as PCI-DSS and state payments regulations
• Establish shared engineering patterns for prompts, tools, telemetry, incident response, and evaluation processes
• Mentor and educate engineering teams on agent development practices, fostering a culture of innovation and excellence
• Partner with product managers and engineering leaders to shape the platform roadmap based on customer needs and business priorities
  
  

Benefits

• Competitive salary range of $225,000 - $285,000 USD annually
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance with 100% coverage for employees
• Stock options with standard startup vesting schedule (1-year cliff, 4-year total)
• Monthly communication stipend of $50 to support phone and internet expenses
• $250 stipend to enhance remote work setup
• Reimbursement for peripheral equipment such as monitors (up to $400), keyboards, and mice (up to $200)
• Paid parental bonding leave and paid sick leave, jury duty, and bereavement leave
• 401(k) retirement plan with company matching
• Flexible Time Off policy, typically allowing team members to take 3-4 weeks annually
  
  

Equal Opportunity

PayNearMe is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We believe that a diverse workforce enhances our products and services and better serves our communities. We strongly encourage applicants from all backgrounds to apply, and we are dedicated to providing an equitable hiring process for all candidates.