Staff Engineer (Trust & Safety)

Role Overview

Join Givebutter as a Staff Software Engineer (Trust & Safety). You’ll design and implement fraud detection and risk decisioning systems, build investigation/review tooling, and help set the technical direction for the Trust & Safety team.

Responsibilities

• Design & build fraud/risk systems, including rule engines and scoring pipelines.
• Collaborate with product, operations, and leadership to identify vulnerabilities and propose solutions.
• Build investigation and review tooling for internal workflows (e.g., case management, review queues).
• Influence technically across teams and stakeholders.
• Mentor and grow engineers on the team by sharing knowledge and working through hard problems.

Requirements

• Strong backend engineering fundamentals with experience designing scalable, event-driven systems and reasoning about distributed systems tradeoffs.
• Debugged production issues across multiple layers of the stack.
• Experience building fraud detection or risk decisioning systems (e.g., rule engines, scoring, policy frameworks, investigation platforms).
• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including meaningful time in adversarial domains (fraud, trust & safety, risk, abuse prevention, etc.).
• Strong judgment and prioritization, able to turn ambiguous problems into actionable plans.
• Collaborative influence: ability to build consensus and navigate ambiguity.
• Experience with PHP/Laravel or a comparable MVC framework (Ruby on Rails, Django, etc.).
• Experience with leading projects or small teams as a senior IC (staff/tech lead-level responsibilities: setting direction, unblocking, mentoring).

Nice to Have / Additional Experience

• React/TypeScript frontend experience.
• Stripe APIs and payments/disputes tooling (e.g., Stripe Radar).
• Background in fundraising, nonprofit tech, or marketplace platforms.
• Exposure to event-driven architectures (CDC, Kafka, event sourcing).
• Experience with AWS, including EKS/Kubernetes and RDS.