Principal Software Engineer, Money Movement (Questbank)

Questrade Financial Group

$150K — $190K *
Finance & Insurance
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of backend engineering experience in high-volume transactional systems.
  • Deep understanding of payment rails and associated mechanisms.
  • Expertise in distributed systems concepts like idempotency and event-driven architecture.
  • Hands-on experience with cloud technologies, particularly Google Cloud.
  • Strong REST and OpenAPI design skills, with solid relational database engineering knowledge.
  • Familiarity with AI-driven development tools and practices.
  • Ability to collaborate cross-disciplinarily and pull stakeholders into problem-solving.

Responsibilities

  • Lead an AI Agent Squad focused on money movement operations.
  • Define the architecture and service boundaries for the payment platform.
  • Deliver integrations across various domestic payment systems.
  • Build and manage the cross-border payment capabilities.
  • Ensure 24/7/365 availability of the engineered solutions.
  • Embed controls for security, compliance, and data protection in the service layer.
  • Collaborate and co-design with cross-functional teams to set delivery standards.

Benefits

  • Comprehensive benefits plan.
  • Competitive incentive (bonus) program for Full-Time Permanent roles.
Full Job Description
We're looking for our next Principal Software Engineer, Money Movement. Could It Be You?

QuestBank is connecting directly to Canada's core payment rails and building the platform that moves money across the Quest ecosystem and across borders. The Senior Software Engineer, Backend owns the engineering behind that platform: Real-Time Rail, Interac e-Transfer, ACSS, Lynx, Bill Payments, internal transfers, and international corridors.

This is also one of the first engineering roles at the Bank designed around an AI-driven SDLC. You lead a squad of AI agents covering architecture, development, QA, and tech lead functions, and you are the accountable engineer for everything they ship. You will define how this way of working operates here rather than inherit someone else's process, and you will ship national payments infrastructure at a pace conventional teams cannot match. The role suits a technical leader who wants scope, ownership, and problems where correctness genuinely matters.

Need more details? Keep reading...

In this role, responsibilities include but are not limited to:
  • Lead an AI Agent Squad: Set the operating model, task decomposition, context standards, and review gates for a squad of AI agents. Arbitrate conflicting outputs and hold the line on anything touching customer funds. You are the single accountable human for correctness, security, and production readiness.
  • Own the Architecture: Define service boundaries, data models, messaging patterns, idempotency, and failure recovery for the money movement platform. Write the specification and acceptance criteria before code generation, and make the calls that cannot be delegated.
  • Build the Domestic Rails: Deliver integrations across RTR, Interac e-Transfer, ACSS, Lynx, EFT and PADs, Bill Payments, and internal money movement. Own ISO 20022 messaging, clearing windows and cut-offs, exception and return handling, and cross-entity settlement.
  • Build International Payments: Deliver cross-border capability including SWIFT correspondent messaging, wire initiation and repair, multi-currency ledgering and FX settlement, nostro and vostro reconciliation, and sanctions screening. Design for partner substitution rather than coupling to a single provider.
  • Run What You Build: Engineer for 24/7/365 availability on real-time rails. Own SLOs, observability, end-to-end traceability, disaster recovery, and the automated test strategy the QA agent executes. Lead technical incident resolution.
  • Engineer the Controls: Embed velocity limits, duplicate protection, AML triggers, audit trails, and data protection in the service layer. Produce the evidence risk, audit, and regulators require, and treat OSFI B-13, E-21, and B-10 and Payments Canada rules as design inputs rather than late-stage checks.
  • Set the Standard: Work directly with product, operations, risk, treasury, and fraud partners, co-designing in the open rather than trading documents across a boundary. Agentic delivery surfaces requirement and control gaps faster than any handoff cycle absorbs them. Review human and agent-authored code, and raise the ceiling on what the squad can safely delegate


So are YOU our next Principal Software Engineer, Money Movement? You are if you...
  • Payments Domain Depth: Fluent reasoning about payment rails, settlement finality, clearing windows, message standards, funds availability, returns and reversals, and reconciliation. Demonstrated end-to-end delivery on at least one rail in production. Recognizes when a generated design is technically valid but wrong for the rail, and defends that judgment to product, operations, and risk.
  • Experience: 5+ years of backend engineering with production ownership of high-volume transactional systems, including time as a tech lead, squad lead, or equivalent scope of technical accountability.
  • Engineering Depth, Language Agnostic: Expert backend fundamentals that transfer across stacks: concurrency, transaction and state management, performance profiling, and the ability to read, critique, and correct unfamiliar code fast. In an agentic workflow the differentiator is judgment about generated code, not fluency in one language. Experience with C# and modern .NET is a nice to have, as the current estate is predominantly .NET, but strong Java, Go, or Kotlin backgrounds will not be screened out.
  • AI-Driven Development: Production delivery using agentic coding tools, ideally Claude CLI. Working knowledge of context and specification design, MCP-based tool integration, agent evaluation, and human review controls.
  • Distributed Systems: Deep grasp of idempotency, exactly-once and at-least-once semantics, event-driven architecture, sagas and compensating transactions, and consistency tradeoffs.
  • Cloud and Delivery: Hands-on with Google Cloud and GKE, containers, Pub/Sub, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and distributed tracing. Equivalent depth on another major cloud with a willingness to ramp is acceptable.
  • APIs and Data: Strong REST and OpenAPI design, event contracts, and versioning. Solid relational database engineering with transaction isolation, schema evolution, and ledger and multi-currency concepts.
  • Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration: Pulls the right people into a problem early, shares working artifacts before they are polished, and builds shared understanding of AI-driven delivery with teams that have not yet adopted it.
  • Ownership: Treats agent output as their own work product and never ships what they cannot explain or defend. Pragmatic about pace in a regulated environment without using regulation as an excuse for slow delivery.


Additional kudos if you...
  • Have experience in the financial services industry


Compensation Information:
  • Base salary range: $150,000 - $190,000
  • The final compensation package will be commensurate with the successful candidate's experience, skills, and geographic location (Canada). It includes a comprehensive benefits plan and a competitive incentive (bonus) program for Full-Time Permanent roles.


Sounds like you? Click below to apply! #LI-DM1 #LI-Hybrid

Similar Jobs

More Jobs at Questrade Financial Group

More Finance & Insurance Jobs

Find similar Principal Software Engineer, Money Movement (Questbank) jobs: