AI-Native Engineer, Team Lead

What's different about this role

No hand-offs. No tickets. No "here's the spec, go build it."

You own the problem — from understanding why it exists, through architecture and implementation, to production monitoring. You're part of a small AI Pod, you work directly with the business, and you ship. The code you write on Monday can be in production by Thursday.

This is a new way of working at Payoneer. We're not filling a seat in an existing process — we're building the methodology as we go. We want someone who's energized by that, not unsettled by it.

About Payoneer

Payoneer enables businesses of all sizes to pay and get paid globally — 25M+ customers, 190+ countries, tens of billions of dollars moving through our platform every year. Behind every transaction is a freelancer in Lagos, an SMB in Warsaw, a marketplace in Seoul. When the system works, their business works.

We're a listed fintech company (NASDAQ: PAYO) with our core engineering hub. We're actively building AI into how we develop — not as a layer on top of the old way, but as a fundamental rethink.

What you'll do

The DNA we're looking for

Curious. You explore new models and tools before anyone tells you to. You want to understand how things actually work, not just that they work.

Innovative. You don't wait for best practices to exist — you run the experiment and help create them. You iterate fast, share what you learn, and push the boundaries of what's possible.

Thinks in workflows, not endpoints. You naturally decompose problems into agentic loops, skills, and orchestrated flows. CRUD with an LLM bolted on isn't a system — you know the difference.

You feel the weight of production. When you're designing, you're already thinking about 2am incidents, runaway inference costs, and edge cases that only surface when real money is moving. That instinct — to stress-test your own assumptions before shipping — is just how you think.

Full-stack owner. You're comfortable touching the prompt, the RAG pipeline, the orchestrator, and the backend. You move up and down the stack to get the job done.

Builder's itch. When you see a repetitive task, or a problem the team has just accepted as "too hard to fix," you can't leave it alone. You go home thinking about it. You come back with a working prototype. Watching people do manually what a system could do makes you uncomfortable — in a productive way.

Grounded confidence. You trust your abilities. You don't need sign-off before every decision. You move forward with incomplete information, make a call, and own it. And when you're wrong, you update and move on — no drama, no ego. The gap between where you are and where you want to be is what gets you out of bed.

What you bring