Staff Software Engineer

SurveyMonkey is the world’s most popular platform for surveys and forms, built for business—loved by users. We combine powerful capabilities with intuitive design, effectively serving every use case, from customer experience to employee engagement, market research to payment and registration forms. With built-in research expertise and AI-powered technology, it’s like having a team of expert researchers at your fingertips.

Trusted by millions—from startups to Fortune 500 companies—SurveyMonkey helps teams gather insights and information that inspire better decisions, create experiences people love, and drive business growth. Discover how at surveymonkey.com.

What we’re looking for

The Billing and Payments team is a multinational engineering team that creates and maintains the software platform for SurveyMonkey’s global payments and billing systems. Our primary focus is to ensure that our customers enjoy a secure checkout experience.

This year we are expanding the team to work on an exciting new integration with Stripe to enhance customer experience, while embedding next-generation AI capabilities—both in the products we build and in how we write code.

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer who has a passion for solving complex problems and leveraging AI-assisted development tools to accelerate software delivery. In this role, you will deliver innovative, resilient systems at a rapid pace while championing modern engineering practices.

• Global Scale & Intelligent Systems: Contribute to a platform used in over 200 countries handling 39+ currencies, integrating modern payment providers, dynamic routing, and predictive fraud prevention.
• Modern AI-Powered Engineering: Champion AI-assisted development practices (such as GitHub Copilot, AI code agents, automated test generation, and AI-driven code reviews) to boost delivery velocity and code quality.
• Scale, Reliability & Data: Support the self-serve purchasing flow of all SurveyMonkey products with high-availability systems designed for deep A/B testing and dynamic optimizations.
• Collaborative Stack: Partner closely with product managers, data scientists, and designers using Python, React, Docker, and AWS.

What you’ll be working on

• Architect, build, and maintain scalable, resilient services across multiple data regions.
• Design and implement AI/ML-assisted features within billing flows (e.g., smart retry logic, dynamic pricing models, and churn prevention).
• Drive engineering productivity by integrating AI-assisted development tools, code generation workflows, and automated testing into the team’s software development lifecycle (SDLC).
• Domain ownership of a suite of services supporting Billing and Payment solutions.
• Author, review, and approve technical designs and architecture blueprints for concurrent initiatives.
• Write readable, extensible backend code in Python, using AI developer tools to accelerate prototyping, refactoring, and documentation.
• Build observable systems that combine operational metrics with predictive telemetry for proactive monitoring.
• Mentor engineers on leveraging AI tooling effectively, establishing best practices for code quality, safety, and security when using AI assistance.

We’d love to hear from people with

• 12+ years of backend application development experience, primarily in high-scale environments.
• Hands-on proficiency using AI-assisted development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, AI agents, automated test generators) to write, refactor, and review high-quality code.
• Deep expertise in designing, building, and maintaining production-grade APIs and microservices using Python and relational/non-relational databases.
• Experience integrating AI/ML capabilities or APIs (predictive analytics, dynamic routing, intelligent retries) into backend systems.
• Strong background in e-commerce, global payment gateways, and subscription billing engines.
• Proven track record leading cross-functional projects, cloud-native architecture on AWS, and streaming frameworks (Kafka, Spark).
• Outstanding communication skills and a passion for mentoring engineers on emerging engineering techniques.

Bonus Qualifications

• Experience establishing AI-driven developer workflows or custom internal AI tooling for engineering teams.
• Hands-on experience with modern AI frameworks (e.g., LangChain, PyTorch, TensorFlow) or LLM API integratio…