Software Engineer, Payments Infrastructure

Location: San Francisco, CA Workplace: OnSite ABOUT US Sierra is the leading platform for customer-facing AI agents, working with many of the world's biggest brands — including The GAP, Rocket Mortgage, SoFi, Sutter Health, and SoftBank — to transform how they serve customers and grow their businesses. We are primarily an in-person company based in San Francisco, with growing offices across North America, Europe, and Asia. We are guided by a set of values that are at the core of our actions and define our culture: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and a commitment to balancing Family along the way. These values are the foundation of our work, and we are committed to upholding them in everything we do. Our co-founders are Bret Taylor https://www.linkedin.com/in/brettaylor/ and Clay Bavor https://www.linkedin.com/in/claybavor/. Bret currently serves as Board Chair of OpenAI. Previously, he was co-CEO of Salesforce (which had acquired the company he founded, Quip) and CTO of Facebook. Bret was also one of Google's earliest product managers and co-creator of Google Maps. Before founding Sierra, Clay spent 18 years at Google, where he most recently led Google Labs. Earlier, he started and led Google’s AR/VR effort, Project Starline, and Google Lens. Before that, Clay led the product and design teams for Google Workspace. WHAT YOU'LL DO The agent must collect and use a card number but can never see it. This work sits across four hard technical domains: payments, security, real-time voice, and LLMs. Voice is the core challenge. A caller speaks or types a card number in a live, low-latency audio stream, and the digits must never reach the model, while the model stays on the call. Sierra owns every system that touches card data, and one small team owns it end to end across three workstreams: Platform, Product, and Safety & Integrity. Customers keep their own telephony and payment gateways. Payments is live in production for some of the largest consumer enterprises, on a platform that handles hundreds of millions of calls a year. The platform is certified to PCI DSS Level 1. - Build real-time card capture for voice: intercept keypad and spoken digits in a live audio stream, upstream of the agent runtime in a network-segmented environment, while the LLM stays live on the call. Make it work across every telephony provider and protocol Sierra supports. - Build and extend the tokenization platform: agents receive and send short-lived tokens, and the platform swaps a token for the real value only when it calls the customer's payment gateway. - Own the payments egress control plane: every destination for card data is approved, versioned with the agent release, and enforced by infrastructure below the application, not by convention. - Make payment actions correct: an at-most-once action primitive in the Agent SDK, validated amounts and items, and monitoring that compares what the agent said about a payment with what really happened. - Keep card data out of places it should not be: deterministic detection in the agent's hot path that catches what general-purpose models miss. No LLM, including any we build ourselves, ever sees a plaintext card number. - Make payments self-serve: one payments API across Agent Studio, the Agent SDK, and Ghostwriter, Sierra's agent-building agent; gateway middleware that developers write against tokens; and support for single-tenant and customer-cloud deployments. Any team can add payments to an agent without a payments engineer in the loop. - Grow the platform beyond cards: extend tokenization into a privacy vault for all PII. WHAT YOU'LL BRING - 5+ years building backend, platform, or infrastructure systems, with a track record of shipping and operating high-reliability services in production. - A deep security instinct. You design as though every component will eventually be compromised, and you reason naturally about blast radius, least privilege, and making bad states impossible rather than reacting to them. - Rigor about correctness under failure: retries, idempotency, at-most-once behavior, and clear handling of timeouts and unclear results from external systems. - Fluency in a systems language (we use Go) and comfort owning critical systems end to end, from design through production and on-call. - Range and ownership. You like a small team with broad scope, you build clean abstractions over messy external systems, and you're never satisfied solving a problem once per customer. - Clear communication. You can explain a design or a risk to other engineering teams and to non-engineers. - Degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent professional experience. You don't need payments experience. The engineers who built this platform came from backend, infrastructure, and security work, not payments. We care more about how you build correct, secure systems than about the word "payments" on your resume. EVEN BETTER… - Real-time or streaming systems: voice, telephony, media, or low-latency pipelines. - Applied cryptography and key management, network isolation, egress control, or cloud security. - Platforms other engineering teams build on, such as APIs, SDKs, and self-serve developer services. - Deployments into customer-owned clouds or single-tenant environments. - Customer-facing technical work, such as architecture reviews with customers. - Setting technical direction on ambiguous, high-stakes problems. - Payments, fintech, or another sensitive-data domain such as healthcare or identity. OUR VALUES - Trust: We build trust with our customers with our accountability, empathy, quality, and responsiveness. We build trust in AI by making it more accessible, safe, and useful. We build trust with each other by showing up for each other professionally and personally, creating an environment that enables all of us to do our best work. - Customer Obsession: We deeply understand our customers’ business goals and relentlessly focus on driving outcomes, not just technical milestones. Everyone at the company knows and spends time with our customers. When our customer is having an issue, we drop everything and fix it. - Craftsmanship: We get the details right, from the words on the page to the system architecture. We have good taste. When we notice something isn’t right, we take the time to fix it. We are proud of the products we produce. We continuously self-reflect to continuously self-improve. - Intensity: We know we don’t have the luxury of patience. We play to win. We care about our product being the best, and when it isn’t, we fix it. When we fail, we talk about it openly and without blame so we succeed the next time. - Family: We know that balance and intensity are compatible, and we model it in our actions and processes. We are the best technology company for parents. We support and respect each other and celebrate each other’s personal and professional achievements. WHAT WE OFFER We want our benefits to reflect our values and offer the following to full-time employees: - Flexible (unlimited) paid time off - Medical, dental, and vision benefits for you and your family - Life insurance and disability benefits - Retirement plan dependent on country of employment - Parental leave - Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot - Lunch, as well as delicious snacks and coffee to keep you energized  - Discretionary benefit stipend giving people the ability to spend where it matters most - Free alphorn lessons These benefits are further detailed in Sierra's policies, may vary by region, and are subject to change at any time, consistent with the terms of any applicable compensation or benefits plans. Eligible full-time employees can participate in Sierra's equity plans subject to the terms of the applicable plans and policies. BE YOU, WITH US We're working to bring the transformative power of AI to every organization in the world. To do so, it is important to us that the diversity of our employees represents the diversity of our customers. We believe that our work and culture are better when we encourage, support, and respect different skills and experiences represented within our team. We encourage you to apply even if your experience doesn't precisely match the job description. We strive to evaluate all applicants consistently without regard to race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, pregnancy, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.