Senior Software Engineer, Risk

At Shakepay, we’re on a mission to usher in the Bitcoin golden age. We’re reimagining financial services to give every Canadian their fair shake.

Our culture is built around doing work that matters, winning as a team, and celebrating success. If you're the kind of person who values growth, shipping fast, and sharing your ideas openly with a group of like-minded people, come and build with us!

About Shakepay

Since 2015, we’ve been building the Shakepay app to make buying and earning bitcoin fast, easy, and secure. In 2022, we launched the Shakepay Card, allowing shakers to earn bitcoin rewards when they shop. Today, more than one million Canadians use Shakepay to grow their bitcoin savings and take control of their financial future. 

We’re regulated across all Canadian provinces and territories, and backed by renowned venture capitalists with a funding of $44M. We have a passionate, loyal, and growing community, and we’re looking for people who want to help us build something truly special.

About the risk team

We’re creating a dedicated Risk team at Shakepay to build the next generation of our risk systems and decisioning capabilities.

The team’s mission is to enable sustainable business growth by protecting customers, Shakepay, and the broader financial ecosystem from abuse while carefully balancing fraud prevention, regulatory compliance, customer experience, and operational efficiency.

This is a small, newly formed team (starting with ~2 engineers and a data partner) with significant ownership, ambiguity, and opportunity to shape foundational systems. The team works closely across fraud, decision science, security, compliance, and customer support, and owns risk-related internal tools and controls.

Senior Software Engineer, Risk

We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help build and evolve Shakepay’s core risk systems.

In this role, you’ll work on overhauling our risk engine, improving decisioning frameworks, and building the data and tooling needed to detect, prevent, and respond to fraud and abuse. You’ll have broad influence across the engineering organization and a direct impact on customer trust and business outcomes.

This role is ideal for an experienced engineer who enjoys ownership, systems thinking, and operating in ambiguous problem spaces, and who cares deeply about balancing protection with customer experience.

What you’ll be doing 

• Build and evolve core risk systems and decisioning infrastructure
• Design and implement scalable backend services that support fraud prevention and compliance
• Improve data instrumentation and observability to enable accurate risk analysis and reporting
• Partner with data, security, compliance, and CS to translate risk insights into effective controls
• Iterate on risk rules and frameworks to reduce false positives and false negatives
• Contribute to internal tools that support investigations and operational efficiency
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and knowledge sharing
• Help define technical direction and best practices for the Risk team
• Operate with a strong sense of ownership in a small, high-impact team

Who we’re looking for 

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer
• Strong backend engineering experience building and operating scalable systems
• Solid understanding of system design, data flows, and performance optimization
• Experience working in highly collaborative, cross-functional environments
• Comfort operating in ambiguous problem spaces with evolving requirements
• Strong sense of ownership and focus on business and customer impact

Bonus points

• Experience with risk, fraud, AML, or trust & safety systems
• Familiarity with technologies like Node.js, Kubernetes, Kafka, Datadog, AWS, or similar
• Experience working in fintech or other regulated environments
• Interest in Bitcoin and excitement to learn more

Why join us?

• Help shape the future of money: Be part of a team that's revolutionizing financial services in Canada, one sat at a time.
• Impact millions: As cryptocurrency continues to gain traction, our potential for growth is massive. You can help us bring Shakepay and Bitcoin to all Canadians.
• Grow your career: We’re growing, and so can you! We have programs in place to encourage continuous learning, growth, and development.
• Ideas, not titles: We want the best ideas to make their way through, no matter where they come from.

Perks and benefits

• 🤝 Be an owner - Every employee has stock options as part of their total compensation. 
• 🥅 Reach your goals - Yearly salary assessments. 
• 🦷 Health & wellness :  Access to health and dental coverage, including health and wellness spending accounts. 
• 🌎 Remote-friendly: Work from anywhere in Canada, with optional access to our office spaces in Montreal and Toronto.
• 🆙 Level Up: A $2,000 annual budget for courses, certifications, and training to support your career growth.
• 🌴 Time off: 20 days of vacation per year. And if you use all your vacation, we give you a $1,000 bonus.
• 🐣 Parental leave: Enjoy a parental leave top up to 100% of your salary for 18 weeks.
• 🙌 Have fun together: quarterly team-specific or company-wide offsite to connect with each other.  

We understand that potential can be just as valuable as experience. If you're eager to learn, grow, and contribute to the mission but worry that you may not have the “right” experience, we still want you to apply. 

We encourage applications from everyone, regardless of background and life experience. We’re firm believers that a little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept.

Fluency in English is required due to the percentage of English-speaking customers and the nature of our platform, which is available to all Canadians.