Staff Software Engineer (Fraud Defender)

Join Vonage and help us innovate cloud communications for businesses worldwide!

Vonage Communications APIs:

As an emerging leader in the $10B+ communications API market, we empower global brands to connect better with their customers, employees, and partners through transformative communications experiences. For example, Vonage API solutions empower organizations to build their custom omnichannel communications structure. This allows them to reach and engage customers on their preferred schedule and channel — including voice, video, and messaging. Think of a rideshare service instantly connecting with customers, hospital staff conducting remote monitoring, customers verifying their identity before completing a purchase, AI virtual agents servicing customers around the clock, and much more.

As businesses continue to shift to a real-time, customer-centric communications model, we are experiencing a time of impressive growth.

Why this role matters:

The Engineering team at Vonage is a group of talented engineers working on complex challenges associated with high-performance distributed systems and processing large volumes of data in real time.

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Fraud Prevention engineering team. As a senior technical leader, you will act as a technical anchor for the platform, shaping the architecture and evolution of systems that process millions of events in real time to protect Vonage customers from fraud.

This role combines deep hands-on engineering with technical leadership. You will drive architectural decisions, guide the technical direction of the team, mentor engineers, and help scale both our platform and engineering practices as the business continues to grow.

We are a team that embraces the future: we hav e a strong and growing adoption of AI across our engineering workflows, and we actively leverage AI agents in our day-to-day work - from accelerating development cycles to enhanci ng fraud detection intelligence. If you are excited about working in an environment where AI is not a buzzword but a real part of how we build and operate, you will feel right at home.

What you will do:

• Provide technical leadership and long-term architectural vision for Vonage's Fraud Prevention Platform.
• Lead the design and evolution of high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems processing millions of fraud detection events in real time.
• Lead performance optimisation initiatives and resolve the most complex system-level challenges.
• Shape the long-term technical roadmap for the Fraud Prevention Platform, balancing business priorities, technical debt, scalability, and operational excellence.
• Drive and own significant architectural decisions, ensuring scalability, reliability, security, and maintainability across the platform.
• Partner with product and engineering leadership to align technical strategy with business objectives.
• Mentor engineers across the team and broader engineering organisation, helping raise technical standards and engineering maturity.
• Define and evolve coding standards, testing strategies, observability practices, and operational excellence across the organisation.
• Guide the team through technical planning, solution design, and delivery of strategic initiatives.
• Take part in on-calls for our production services.

The Stack

• Language – Java (primary); Python and Golang experience is a plus
• Spring, Spring Boot
• Cloud – AWS primarily (Bedrock, DynamoDB, RDS, EKS, S3, IAM, SQS, Lambda)
• Monitoring and observability (Prometheus, Grafana, Kibana)
• Kafka
• MySQL/PostgreSQL
• Redis (time series, search)
• Docker, Kubernetes, Helm

What you will bring:

Essential

• Prior experience as a Tech Lead, Team Lead, Staff Engineer, or equivalent technical leadership role, with demonstrated ownership of technical direction, architecture, and delivery across multiple engineers or teams.
• Deep expertise designing scalable, highly available, distributed, event-driven systems using our core tech stack (Java/Spring Boot, AWS, Kafka, and Kubernetes).
• Strong track record of mentoring engineers and helping teams grow technically.
• Deep understanding of performance optimisation, scalability, reliability, and operational excellence.
• Experience with containerised applications and orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes and Helm.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence both technical and non-technical audiences.
• An AI-native mindset, with practical experience using AI tools or agents to improve engineering productivity and software delivery.

Nice to have

• Experience working on fraud prevention, risk management, or real-time decisioning systems.
• Experience building machine learning or AI-powered solutions in production environments.
• Experience operating large-scale SaaS platforms with high traffic and low latency.
• Knowledge of the telecommunications or …