Staff Software Engineer

About Octane Octane is an Egyptian digital fleet payment company. Businesses use our platform to pay for, control, and track everything their fleets spend on the road.

Our engineering team builds and operates every transaction system.

The Role The Staff Software Engineer is our most senior hands-on engineer: you own the architecture of the systems that move money for fleets, and you lead how Octane builds with AI, both in the product and in how our engineers work.

This is an individual-contributor role, not a management role. You report to the Director of Engineering and work across all of our engineering teams. Expect to split your time roughly evenly between writing code and multiplying the engineers around you through design, review, and mentoring.

What You Will Do

• Lead AI in the product. Design and ship AI-powered features on top of our transaction, vehicle, and fleet data: LLM-based assistants, agents, and automation that give fleet managers answers and actions, not dashboards. Own the architecture for retrieval, evaluation, safety, and cost.
• Lead AI-assisted engineering. Set how our teams use AI coding tools and agents safely and productively, from standards and guardrails to the internal tooling that makes them effective.
• Own architecture across teams. Set the technical direction for our core payment and transaction services, and write the design docs that others build from.
• Ship the hard parts yourself. Take on the highest-risk work: money movement, ledger correctness, high-volume transaction paths, and integrations with banks, stations, and partners.
• Make production boring. Drive reliability, observability, safe deployments and rollback, and database change governance. Lead incident response and make sure each incident is fixed at the root.
• Design for new markets. Shape our platform so Saudi Arabia and the UAE are configuration and extension, not a rewrite: multi-currency, multi-entity, local regulation, and e-invoicing.
• Raise the engineering bar. Review designs and code, set testing and CI standards, and mentor senior engineers toward staff-level judgment.
• Be a technical partner to product and leadership. Turn business goals into a realistic technical plan, with clear trade-offs, costs, and risks.

What Success Looks Like In Your First Year

• Squads come to you before they commit to a design, and their designs are better for it.
• Our core transaction services have a clear target architecture and a roadmap the teams are delivering against.
• Production incidents are fewer, shorter, and rarely repeat.
• At least one senior engineer is visibly operating at a higher level because of your mentoring.

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years of backend engineering, including time as the technical lead for systems spanning several teams.
• Hands-on experience shipping LLM-based features to production: prompt and context design, RAG, agents and tool use, evaluation, cost and latency control.
• Daily, fluent use of AI coding tools and agents, and opinions on how a team should adopt them.
• A track record of owning large production systems end to end: design, delivery, operation and evolution.
• Deep distributed-systems skills: consistency, idempotency, queues and workflows, failure handling, performance at scale.
• Strong relational database skills: schema design, query tuning, safe migrations on live data.
• Hands-on cloud and container experience (AWS and Kubernetes preferred).
• Clear written communication: design docs and decisions that engineers and non-engineers can both follow.
• A habit of mentoring: you have made other senior engineers better.
• Fintech, payments, or ledger experience.
• Experience taking a product into new countries or regulatory regimes, especially in the GCC.
• Analytics data pipelines (CDC, columnar stores) and using them as the data layer for AI features.
• Experience with MCP, agent frameworks, or building internal AI platforms.