---
title: 'Sr. Software Engineer at VGS'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/sr-software-engineer-vgs-san-francisco-a1p5n9ygjyfc'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# Sr. Software Engineer at VGS

- **Company:** VGS
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $140k–$230k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2025-10-18
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.lever.co/verygoodsecurity/21eae4be-c4cb-48d3-9e08-c3923f3cf081

## Job description

## About VGS

VGS is building the trust infrastructure for a new era of commerce. As commerce becomes agentic, payments are increasing dramatically in volume, speed, and complexity, and the companies driving that shift need a foundation they can fully trust.

That's where VGS comes in. We're the world's leader in payment tokenization, trusted by the most innovative AI and Fortune 500 companies, merchants, banks, and fintechs to power modern payments and agentic commerce. We store more than 9 billion tokens and process more than 10 billion monthly interactions, touching a third of all e-commerce. That scale isn't incidental. It's why leading companies embed our universal token vault and credential management platform directly into their stack, taming the complexity of payment data so they can move faster.

Come build the platform that enables modern payments for the world's largest companies. We're helping businesses unlock new possibilities in an industry that never stops moving. And that takes exceptional people.

Trusted Engineering That Matters Engineering at VGS VGS is building the platform powering agentic commerce and global payments infrastructure. VGS Engineering is the pillar that supports that vision. We create a platform that is an indispensable, ubiquitous component of our partners' payments and security infrastructure. We build and operate high-scale, reliable, and resilient systems that manage mission-critical payment data across the globe. We don't just participate in the payments ecosystem; we power it.

Our Environment & Culture Modern Tooling as Leverage: We value speed and impact. To ensure nothing slows you down, we arm you with a highly consistent modern stack (e.g. AWS, Kubernetes, Java, TypeScript, Python) and world-class AI-augmented SDLC tooling. We strip away the friction so you can focus on the problems that demand creativity and judgment. Ownership of Outcomes: Scaling global payments infrastructure requires individuals who take personal ownership of outcomes from day one. We look for builders who combine high agency with deep strategic alignment; channeling their urgency and relentless iteration into what matters most. Mission-Critical Accountability: We power payments infrastructure for global market leaders, making system trust and integrity our core deliverable. We don't treat compliance (PCI, SOC2, ISO27001), security patching, and platform maintenance as administrative overhead—we engineer them with first-class product discipline.  In payments infrastructure, reliability is not background work, it’s part of what customers buy.

Learn More: See how our engineering practices drive trust and innovation in our official blog and our reliability practices.

## About the Role

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will be a key contributor and technical practitioner on our Payments Acceptance team. In this role, you will help design, scale, and fortify global, high-throughput payment systems designed to execute mission-critical transactions with zero downtime. You will take direct ownership of expanding our high-impact Value-Added Services (VAS) including Network Tokens, Account Updater, 3DS, and Account Validation.

Working hand-in-hand with Tech Leads, Product Management, and adjacent platform teams, you will execute complex initiatives and uphold enterprise reliability standards. Rather than executing against rigid task lists or waiting for top-down instructions, you will bring high agency to your daily work, pioneering AI-native engineering methodologies and integrating agentic workflows across the entire SDLC. We are looking for hands-on product-minded builders who refuse to settle for the status quo, hate manual friction, and take immense pride in solving complex distributed systems challenges at 10,000+ TPS with exceptional quality, scalability, reliability, and security.

## What You'll Do

Build Mission-Critical Payments Services: Design, build, and optimize high-availability, low-latency, and resilient Java microservices powering our core Payments Acceptance platform and Value-Added Services. Drive AI-Native Engineering: Actively integrate AI-augmented development tools and agentic workflows into your daily SDLC—from rapid prototyping and automated code generation to comprehensive test suite creation and complex refactoring to eliminate friction and multiply delivery velocity. Drive Resiliency & Automation: Eliminate manual toil by building automated, self-healing services using GitOps, modern CI/CD pipelines, and robust Infrastructure-as-Code practices. Deep Observability & Operations: Configure and maintain telemetry tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) to proactively spot bottlenecks. You will participate in on-call rotations and lead blameless post-mortems to continuously harden system reliability. Enable Engineering Velocity: Partner with cross-functional teams to build and adopt "Golden Paths" that streamline software delivery. Mentor mid-level and junior engineers while championing high code quality and testing standards. Customer & Product Impact: Own service functionality end-to-end ensuring security, performance, and low latency for external customer traffic while supporting smooth platform adoption internally.

## What You Bring

Ownership at Scale: 5+ years of software engineering experience taking personal ownership of features in complex, high-throughput distributed systems within mission-critical environments. Java & Microservices Expertise: Proficiency in Java and modern frameworks (Spring/Spring Boot), with a strong command of REST API design, distributed architecture, and microservices design patterns. Data & Messaging Systems: Hands-on experience with event-driven architectures, messaging systems (Kafka, SQS), and relational database tuning and performance optimization. Cloud-Native & Containers: Solid hands-on experience with containerized delivery paradigms (Docker, Kubernetes/EKS) and public cloud ecosystems, preferably AWS. Security & Compliance Foundations: Solid understanding of secure coding practices, API security, and operating within regulated compliance frameworks (PCI-DSS, SOC2). Growth Mindset & High Agency: You're curious; you thrive at acquiring the context and asking questions needed to solve meaningful problems without needing every task spelled out. You have an innate drive to experiment, automate away repetitive tasks, and acquire whatever missing context is needed to solve complex technical challenges end-to-end. Nice to Have: Experience with tokenization, payment processing, or security products BA/BS degree A knack for out-of-the-box thinking that thrives in a fast-paced startup environment Direct domain experience in payments (Network Tokens, Account Updater, or 3DS). Hands-on experience leveraging AI developer tools, or agentic automation in day-to-day engineering workflows. Proven track record of database performance tuning or query troubleshooting in high-concurrency production environments.

## About VGS

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: VGS provides a tokenization and credential management platform that secures sensitive payment data for enterprises, enabling PCI compliance and network value-added services.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series C)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2015
- **Founders**: Not publicly available

## Core Business
- Primary industry/industries: Financial Services, Payment Tokenization, Data Security
- Target customers: B2B – Fortune 500 companies, merchants, fintechs, banks, marketplaces, and gaming/hospitality organizations
- Mission or purpose statement: "To transform how sensitive payment data is stored, secured, and used to enable agentic commerce and beyond" [verygoodsecurity.com](https://www.verygoodsecurity.com/about-us)

## Products & Services
- **[Card Management Platform](https://www.verygoodsecurity.com/about-us)**: Composable, single-API platform that unifies Network Tokens, Account Updater, Card Attributes, and 3DS into one card object.
- **[Vault](https://www.verygoodsecurity.com/about-us)**: PCI-compliant secure vault for tokenizing sensitive data (card numbers, PII) so it never touches client systems.
- **[Network Tokens](https://www.verygoodsecurity.com/about-us)**: Randomized codes issued by card networks (Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover) that replace PANs to reduce fraud and improve authorization rates.
- **[Account Updater](https://www.verygoodsecurity.com/about-us)**: Direct network integration that continuously updates card-on-file data to reduce failed transactions.
- **[Card Attributes / BIN Lookup](https://www.verygoodsecurity.com/about-us)**: Detailed card metadata (beyond BIN) for fraud prevention and payment optimization.
- **[3DS (Three-Domain Secure)](https://www.verygoodsecurity.com/about-us)**: Security protocol for verifying cardholder identity during online payments.
- **[Account Validation](https://www.verygoodsecurity.com/about-us)**: Card verification, CVC verification, AVS, and ANI services to confirm account ownership and validity.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly available
- **Key Metric**: Annual Revenue – USD 35,000,000 (LinkedIn estimate) [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/very-good-security)
- **Total Funding**: USD 104,930,000 across 6 rounds [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/very-good-security)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Andreessen Horowitz (Series A lead), Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking Division (Series B lead), Vertex Ventures (Series C lead) [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/very-good-security)
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - 45 billion annual interactions processed globally [verygoodsecurity.com](https://www.verygoodsecurity.com/)
  - 7 billion tokens held globally
  - Workforce of 117 employees distributed across 12 countries (including US, Ukraine, Canada, Greece, India)
  - Monthly employee growth of +1.7% [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/very-good-security)

## Competitive Advantages
- One of the few providers with **direct network connections** to card networks (Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover), enabling the most up-to-date account information and higher authorization rates [verygoodsecurity.com](https://www.verygoodsecurity.com/about-us)
- **Tokenization-first approach** reduces PCI DSS scope and simplifies compliance for clients
- **Single API** for multiple network value-added services (Network Tokens, Account Updater, Card Attributes, 3DS), reducing integration complexity
- Proven trust with **Fortune 500** organizations and regulated financial institutions

## Strategic Focus
- **Agentic Commerce**: Enabling secure, autonomous transactions where intelligent agents initiate, manage, and optimize payments without exposing sensitive data [verygoodsecurity.com](https://www.verygoodsecurity.com/about-us)
- **Card Management Platform expansion**: Consolidating multiple card services into one interoperable solution
- **Global scalability**: Growing distributed engineering and operations teams to support international clients

## Why Work Here
- **Distributed & flexible**: Remote-first with hybrid options in San Francisco Bay Area; open to candidates across the US and Canada [jobs.lever.co](https://jobs.lever.co/verygoodsecurity)
- **Engineering-centric culture**: 53 out of 117 employees are in technical roles (45%), indicating strong product and engineering investment [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/very-good-security)
- **Impact at scale**: Work on a platform handling 45 billion annual interactions and securing data for the world’s largest enterprises
- **Diverse, international team**: Employees across 12 countries, with significant presence in Ukraine, Canada, Greece, and India
- **Growth opportunities**: Recent headcount growth (+1.7% monthly) and active hiring for roles like Strategic Finance Manager, Staff Accountant, and Senior Manager of Revenue Operations & Analytics

## Sources
1. [verygoodsecurity.com – Homepage](https://www.verygoodsecurity.com/)
2. [verygoodsecurity.com – About Us](https://www.verygoodsecurity.com/about-us)
3. [linkedin.com – VGS Company Page](https://www.linkedin.com/company/very-good-security)
4. [cbinsights.com – VGS Profile](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/very-good-security)
5. [jobs.lever.co – VGS Careers](https://jobs.lever.co/verygoodsecurity)

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