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 45,000 businesses of all sizes across Australia. We help our customers navigate the complexities of the payment's ecosystem—enabling them to focus on what matters most: growing their business.
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.
About The Role
As the
Senior Software Engineer
, you'll be joining a small, focused team (~5 people) responsible for Australia and New Zealand's domestic account-to-account payment infrastructure. This team owns the systems that power BECS (Bulk Electronic Clearing System) and NPP (New Payments Platform) processing at Fat Zebra — enabling merchants to move money directly between bank accounts.
As a
Senior Software Engineer
on this team, you'll work on services that support real-time payments, direct debits and credits, and settlements — all built with security, reliability, and scalability in mind. Our architecture consists of event-driven service-oriented services and majestic monoliths; you'll contribute to both new capabilities and ongoing refinement of existing systems.
You'll collaborate closely with engineers, product managers, and operations to design clean interfaces, write well-tested code, and support systems in production. The work is deeply tied to real financial flows — it's complex, high-trust, and highly rewarding.
We focus on building simple, dependable systems, choosing the right tools for the job. Across Fat Zebra, we use Ruby on Rails, Go, Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Postgres, ElasticSearch, Prometheus, AWS, just to name a few.
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 payments 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 a deep understanding of BECS and/or NPP systems.
You have 3+ years of hands-on experience as a software engineer, ideally building and maintaining backend services in a production environment.
You're 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, and building systems that are observable, testable, and resilient.
You're familiar with (or curious about) event-driven architecture and service-oriented systems, and understand the tradeoffs of working with distributed components and shared state.
You're at ease navigating complexity — whether that's mapping out a payments flow across multiple services, reasoning about concurrency and edge cases, or handling regulatory constraints with care.
You're a 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, building software that makes a real-world impact and ideally has experience with BECS and NPP systems.
Essential Information
Enjoy flexible working arrangements and a supportive, people-first culture. Fat Zebra is a fully remote Australian company, with employees in almost every Australian capital city. We have offices in Sydney and Melbourne that some Zebras work from, but we support working-from-home. We will supply you with office equipment such as a laptop and monitor if you need this for your role.
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 Filipppne
on or apply to the link below.