Staff Engineer, Payments & Fraud

OUR MISSION Everyone knows the feeling of opening something unexpected and loving it. Icy. Box turns that feeling into a business. We started as a watch commerce and mystery box company and are building a consumer brand people trust and come back to. We move fast, sweat the details, and are still writing our playbook. OUR VALUES

• Move Fast, Build Right: Ship today, fix tomorrow.
• Own the Gap: If nobody owns it, we step in.
• Clarity Is a Gift: Turn noise into decisions and action.
• Trust Over Title: Follow-through beats position.
• Say the Real Thing: Hard conversations happen early.
• Do the Unglamorous Work: No task is beneath us.

About the Role

We’re hiring a Staff Engineer to own Payments and Fraud. Every Icy. Box order runs through systems you’ll work on: checkout, payment processing, refunds and fraud prevention. You’ll set the technical direction, keep fraud losses low, and keep good customers moving through checkout without friction, and make sure finance can trust every number.

This role is in person at our New York City office, five days a week. What You’ll Do

• Implement and own the architecture for payments, refunds and reconciliation in Rust
• Build and tune fraud detection, including rules, risk scoring and models
• Cut chargebacks, fraud losses and false declines while protecting conversion
• Integrate and manage payment providers such as Stripe or PayPal, plus wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay
• Keep our payment systems compliant with PCI DSS and card network rules
• Lead the response to payment outages and fraud attacks
• Connect with Snowflake and other data analysis platforms
• Work with finance, operations and support on disputes, refunds and reporting What We’re Looking For - 8+ years of software engineering experience, with significant time building payments or fraud systems at scale
• Strong backend skills in Rust, or in another typed language plus a clear interest in moving to Rust.
• Deep knowledge of card payments: authorization, capture, settlement, refunds and chargebacks
• Hands-on experience building fraud detection or risk systems
• Strong backend skills and experience designing reliable, idempotent distributed systems
• A track record of leading cross-team technical projects from design to launch
• Able to explain tradeoffs clearly to engineers and non-engineers Nice to Have
• Strong PostgreSQL / SQL: schema design, migrations, query performance
• Experience in e-commerce or high-value goods such as watches, luxury or collectibles
• Experience with fraud tools such as Stripe Radar
• Experience with payouts and KYC platforms
• Machine learning for risk scoring
• Chargeback management and dispute representment
• Multi-currency and international payments
• Experience using AI coding tools effectively in your daily workflow
• Startup or high-growth company experience