Staff Software Engineer II

About Blackhawk Network

Today, through BHN’s single global platform, businesses of all kinds can tap into the world’s largest network of branded payment solutions. BHN helps businesses grow revenue, increase loyalty, motivate and reward their teams, disburse funds and engage consumers. Branded payment solutions include the issuance and distribution of gift cards, egifts, corporate payouts and rewards, along with the technology to deliver these products in seamless, integrated ways. BHN’s network spans the globe with more than 400,000 consumer touchpoints. Learn more at BHN.com.

Overview

The Staff II Software Engineer is a senior individual contributor who provides technical leadership across a platform or domain and drives complex, cross-team engineering initiatives from problem framing through production outcomes. This role translates business priorities into durable architecture, a sequenced technical roadmap, and high-quality implementation. The engineer remains hands-on while setting direction, resolving consequential technical trade-offs, and influencing teams beyond their immediate group.

The role advances secure, resilient, scalable, and observable systems for Blackhawk Network’s customers and internal teams. It strengthens engineering practices through design leadership, mentoring, and clear technical communication. The Staff II engineer also evaluates emerging capabilities, including AI, with a disciplined focus on customer value, security, privacy, regulatory obligations, and responsible adoption. This is an individual-contributor role and has no direct supervisory responsibility.

Responsibilities

Functions

• Set technical direction for a platform or domain, connecting business outcomes to architecture, platform evolution, and a practical multi-quarter roadmap.
• Own and shape the technical backlog for the area: identify systemic risks and opportunities, prioritize foundational work, and make progress visible through measurable outcomes.
• Lead ambiguous, high-impact initiatives spanning multiple teams; clarify the problem, surface dependencies and risks, align stakeholders, and guide delivery through production adoption.
• Design and review architectures for distributed, event-driven, cloud-based systems, documenting key decisions, trade-offs, migration paths, and operational considerations.
• Make sound build, buy, and partner recommendations; evaluate technologies, libraries, vendors, and AI-enabled capabilities against business value, total cost, security, privacy, and operational fit.
• Deliver and evolve secure, performant, scalable, resilient, and observable services, contributing hands-on code and ensuring sound testing, deployment, release, and rollback practices.
• Raise reliability and operational maturity through service health measures, capacity and failure-mode analysis, production readiness, incident learning, and durable corrective actions.
• Partner with Security, Privacy, Risk, Compliance, Product, and other stakeholders to embed applicable payment-industry and regulatory requirements in designs and delivery plans.
• Contribute to responsible AI adoption within the platform or domain: identify suitable use cases, assess data and model risks, establish appropriate controls and validation, and monitor outcomes before expanding use.
• Establish and promote engineering standards and reusable patterns across teams through design reviews, technical documentation, and communities of practice.
• Coach and mentor engineers, strengthen technical judgment across the organization, and help teams resolve difficult design and delivery challenges without taking over their ownership.
• Communicate technical strategy and material risks clearly to engineering leaders and cross-functional partners; influence decisions through evidence and sound reasoning.
• Measure the customer, business, and operational impact of delivered capabilities and use feedback to refine the roadmap.
• Perform additional duties as assigned.

Competencies

• Demonstrated ability to frame and solve complex, ambiguous technical problems that span services, teams, and business functions.
• Strong systems thinking: understands how architecture, data, security, reliability, developer experience, and operating cost interact over time.
• Makes timely, explainable decisions with incomplete information; weighs reversibility, risk, mitigation, and long-term consequences.
• Influences across organizational boundaries without relying on formal authority; builds alignment among stakeholders with differing priorities.
• Distills business and technical context into clear requirements, options, decision records, roadmaps, and delivery plans.
• Applies strong engineering judgment across design, implementation, testing, deployment, operations, and continuous improvement.
• Anticipates security, privacy, compliance, reliability, and scalability concerns and incorporates mitigations early in the lifecycle.
• Sets a high bar for technical quality while balancing pragmatic delivery, incremental change, and maintainability.
• Develops other engineers through coaching, constructive feedback, thoughtful reviews, and delegation of meaningful technical ownership.
• Communicates directly and clearly in writing and verbally, including when explaining trade-offs, uncertainty, and production risk.
• Adapts to shifting priorities and technology while sustaining progress on foundational work and longer-term platform health.

Qualifications

Required Technical Skills

• Extensive experience designing and delivering distributed, service-oriented and event-driven systems in production.
• Strong knowledge of software architecture, design patterns, SOLID principles, object-oriented design, and service/API design.
• Expertise in Java 17 or higher and Spring Boot 3.1 or higher, or comparable depth in a modern enterprise programming stack with the ability to work effectively in this stack.
• Strong understanding of transactionality, ACID properties, relational data modeling, SQL, and data integrity in distributed applications.
• Experience designing for security, privacy, availability, resilience, performance, observability, and operational supportability.
• Experience with automated testing, CI/CD, production monitoring, incident response, and safe release practices.
• Ability to assess emerging technologies, including AI/ML-enabled systems, for suitability, risk, and responsible use in a regulated or customer-sensitive environment.

Preferred Technical Skills

• Experience with SQL and/or NoSQL data repositories.
• Experience using AWS Cloud Formation to define and deploy infrastructure on AWS; strong knowledge of core AWS services.
• Experience in payment systems, financial technology, or other highly regulated, high-availability environments.
• Experience with AI/ML platform architecture, AI governance, model or output validation, and production controls.
• Experience establishing platform roadmaps, architecture standards, or reusable engineering capabilities across multiple teams.

Required Education and Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field and 10+ years of software development experience, or 12+ years of equivalent practical experience.
• Substantial experience building and operating production-grade distributed systems.
• Demonstrated technical leadership of complex initiatives involving multiple teams, with accountability for architecture and delivery outcomes.
• Programming experience in at least one modern software development language and willingness to remain hands-on.

Preferred Education and Experience

• Experience delivering secure, scalable, resilient services at enterprise scale.
• Experience in an Agile or similarly iterative engineering environment.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS.
• Experience mentoring engineers and improving technical practices across a team or engineering organization.
• Experience working with product, security, compliance, risk, and operations partners on technology decisions.