Staff Engineer - Fraud Prevention

Who we are:

Sardine is the leading agentic risk platform for fighting financial crime. Our integrated solution unifies data across risk teams to help organizations stop fraud in real time, prevent AI-driven attacks, and automate fraud and AML operations. Sardine’s platform is strengthened by one of the fastest-growing fraud consortiums in the market, spanning more than 6 billion profiled devices, 800 million consumers, and 3 million businesses worldwide.

Leading companies including FIS, GoDaddy, Intuit, Edward Jones, ZoomInfo, and Checkout.com rely on Sardine to secure and grow trust in their products.

Our culture:

We hire talented, self-motivated individuals with extreme ownership and high growth orientation.

We value performance and not hours worked. We believe you shouldn't have to miss your family dinner, your kid's school play, friends get-together, or doctor's appointments for the sake of adhering to an arbitrary work schedule.

We're a remote-first team spread across time zones, so no office to report to - work from wherever helps you do your best work. Just a couple of things to keep in mind: pay is based on where you're located, and you'll need to keep a home base in the country you're hired in. So while we love the "coffee shop today, mountains tomorrow" life, this isn't a passport-optional, work-from-anywhere-on-Earth kind of remote - think flexible within your country, not borderless.

Location:

Remote - USA or Canada

Given the strategic nature of this role, we expect a degree of flexibility for somewhat regular in-person meetings with our leadership team in San Francisco, Berkeley.

About the Role

You will serve as the technical steward and platform architect for both our Consumer Fraud and Business Fraud engineering teams. This position involves driving technical strategy, optimizing mission-critical infrastructure, mentoring engineers, and assuming broad ownership of a platform that processes massive volumes of data in real-time.

What you’ll be doing:

• Act as the overarching technical leader for multiple teams, partnering with stakeholders to unify platform strategy.
• Architect, design, and optimize ultra-low-latency backend services and a high-throughput rules engine.
• Design optimal data access patterns, partitioning strategies, and caching layers across our complex, multi-cloud database ecosystem.
• Develop robust pipelines for massive parallel execution of real-time feature computations and aggregations.
• Play a pivotal role in shaping engineering culture, mentoring senior engineers, and driving high technical standards from conception to delivery.

What you’ll need:

7+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record operating at a Staff, Principal, or Lead Architect level.

Deep expertise in building highly available, distributed systems with strict ultra-low latency.

Hands-on experience working with stream processing frameworks (e.g., Kafka, Flink, SQS, PubSub) in production environments.

Advanced proficiency in polyglot persistence, with experience tuning data models across Document, Wide-Column, and Relational databases.

A strong platform engineering mindset focused on reliability, observability, and developer velocity.

Proficiency in communicating complex architectural concepts and driving cross-team consensus.