Senior Staff Software Engineer | API

MEET DEEPL DeepL is a global AI product and research company focused on building secure, intelligent solutions to complex business problems. Over 200,000 business customers and millions of individuals across 228 global markets today trust DeepL's Language AI platform for human-like translation, improved writing and real-time voice translation. Founded in 2017 by CEO Jaroslaw “Jarek” Kutylowski, DeepL now has around 1,000 passionate employees and is supported by world-renowned investors including Benchmark, IVP, and Index Ventures. Our goal is to become the global leader in trusted, intelligent AI technology, building products that drive better communication, foster connections, and create a meaningful impact. To achieve this, we need talented people like you to join our journey. If you’re ready to shape the future of AI and grow your career in a fast-moving, purpose-driven environment, DeepL is your next destination. WHAT SETS US APART What sets us apart is our blend of cutting-edge AI technology, meaningful work, and a culture where people truly thrive. We’re a team of innovators, researchers, and creators driven by a shared purpose to unlock human potential by making work simpler, smarter, and more connected. When we share what it’s like to work at DeepL, the reactions are overwhelmingly positive. This might be because of our technology that helps millions of people and businesses communicate and work better every day, or because of the trust, curiosity, and care that shape our culture. What we know for sure is this: being part of DeepL means joining a team dedicated to innovation, growth, and well-being. Discover more about life at DeepL onLinkedIn,Instagram, and our Blog. MEET THE TEAM BEHIND THIS JOURNEY You will be joining the PAC (Payments, Abuse & Conversion) team, part of the BAT (Business Acceleration Technology) organisation within DeepL's Monetisation track. This team sits at the commercial core of DeepL's self-serve growth engine, owning the full customer journey from activation through to paid conversion and ensuring that journey remains secure. PAC manages DeepL's self-serve B2C segment, driving user activation, retention, and monetisation while maintaining robust fraud and abuse prevention across the platform. The team owns the end-to-end checkout experience, payment gateway integrations, pricing and packaging, and a suite of proprietary fraud and bot protection systems. Your primary customers are DeepL's end users and the revenue they generate, with direct, measurable impact on self-serve ARR and fraud loss metrics. YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES * People Leadership: Lead, mentor, and grow a distributed team of engineers across varying seniority levels. You will own their well-being and development through regular 1:1s, continuous feedback, performance reviews, and dedicated career development coaching. Building a high-trust, high-performance team culture is central to this role. * Execution & Delivery: Own the team's delivery cadence, establishing a predictable and healthy agile process. You will partner with your Product Manager to define, refine, and prioritise the quarterly roadmap, ensuring the team's work drives measurable impact on self-serve ARR and fraud prevention outcomes. * Technical Guidance: Act as the team's technical steward. While this is a low to no hands-on coding role, your strong engineering background is essential. You will guide architectural decisions across PAC's payments and fraud infrastructure, review system designs, and uphold high standards for quality, scalability, reliability, and security. * Fraud & Conversion Ownership: Hold the strategic balance between conversion optimisation and fraud prevention, the defining tension of this team's mandate. You will make pragmatic, data-informed trade-offs across activation, retention, bot protection, rate limiting, and abuse detection to protect DeepL's revenue while minimising friction for legitimate users. * Stakeholder Management: Serve as PAC's primary representative in planning and cross-functional discussions. You will articulate technical trade-offs in commercial terms, build strong relationships with product, finance, and engineering stakeholders, and ensure the team's work is understood and valued across the organisation. QUALITIES WE LOOK FOR * People management experience: Proven experience in direct people management, leading engineering teams through growth, performance challenges, and organisational change. * Strong technical foundation: Significant hands-on experience as a Senior or Staff-level backend engineer, with the depth to guide architectural discussions and earn credibility with a senior team. * Payments domain experience: Proven hands-on experience building or managing payment gateway integrations, checkout flows, or billing infrastructure at production scale. This is non-negotiable given the team's core technical estate. * Fraud & trust systems familiarity: Sufficient depth in fraud prevention, abuse detection, rate limiting, or bot protection to guide architectural decisions across a complex, multi-layered fraud stack. * Distributed systems design: Proven experience designing, building, and operating scalable, highly available distributed systems in a cloud-native environment. * Modern tech stack experience: Demonstrable experience with cloud platforms (preferably AWS), containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes), and API design (gRPC, REST). * Database expertise: Hands-on experience with both relational and NoSQL databases. * A people-first approach: Deep commitment to the growth and well-being of your team, with proven experience in coaching, mentorship, and performance management. * Commercial and data fluency: Comfort interrogating funnel metrics, conversion data, and fraud loss reporting to drive prioritisation decisions and communicate impact to stakeholders. * Strong execution: A pragmatic approach to balancing technical excellence with the practical need to ship, with a track record of delivering in high-stakes, fast-moving environments. NICE TO HAVES * Fraud ML or risk engine experience: Familiarity with machine learning-based fraud detection or risk scoring systems. * Event-driven systems: Demonstrated experience with event-based processing and messaging systems such as Kafka. * Self-serve SaaS growth: Experience owning or contributing to activation, retention, or monetisation metrics in a B2C or PLG SaaS context. * Hiring experience: Proven track record of hiring and onboarding software engineers in a distributed team environment. * DevOps & scaling: Strong experience with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure scaling, and cloud migration. WHAT WE OFFER * Diverse and internationally distributed team: joining our team means becoming part of a large, global community with people of more than 90 nationalities. We're more than just colleagues; we're a group of professionals with a shared mission to connect diverse cultures. Our global presence is growing–we've doubled in size nearly every year, with our employees based in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, the US, and Japan, and we continue to expand our network. * Open communication, regular feedback: as a language-focused company, we value the importance of clear, honest communication. We value smooth collaboration, direct and actionable feedback, and believe that leading with empathy and growth mindset makes us better together. * Hybrid work, flexible hours: we offer a hybrid work schedule, with team members coming into the office twice a week. This allows you to engage directly with your team and experience the unique energy of our workspace, while still enjoying the flexibility and comfort of working from home. With flexible working hours and trust in your productivity, we are in sync with your team’s general locations and time zones to foster effective and seamless collaboration. * Virtual Shares - An ownership mindset in every role. We believe everyone should share in our success, and that’s why every employee receives Virtual Shares, linking your contribution directly to DeepL’s growth and rewarding you with a stake in our future. * Regular in-person team events: we bond over vibrant events that are as unique as our team, from local team and business unit gatherings, to new-joiner onboardings, to company-wide events that bring us all together–literally. * Monthly full-day hacking sessions: every month, we have Hack Fridays, where you can spend your time diving into a project you're passionate about and get the opportunity to work with other teams–we value your initiatives, impact, and creativity. * 30 days of annual leave: we value your peace of mind. With 30 days off (excluding public holidays) and access to mental health resources, we make sure you're as strong mentally as you are professionally. * Competitive benefits: just as our team spans the globe, so does our benefits package. We've crafted it to reflect the diversity of our team and tailored it to align with your unique location, to ensure you feel supported every step of the way. If this role and our mission resonate with you, but you're hesitant because you don't check all the boxes, don't let that hold you back. At DeepL, it's all about the value you bring and the growth we can foster together. Go ahead, apply—let's discover your potential together. We can't wait to meet you! #LI-JL1 WE ARE AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER You are welcome at DeepL for who you are - we appreciate authenticity here. Our product is for everyone, and so is our workplace. The more voices we have represented and amplified in our business, the more we will all succeed, contribute, and think forward! So bring us your personal experience, your perspectives, and your background. It’s in our diversity that we will find the power to break down language barriers in the world.