Payment Systems Architect / Lead Engineer

We are looking for a seasoned Payment Systems Architect / Lead Engineer to define and lead the technical vision of our enterprise payments platform. This role will partner closely with Product to translate business requirements and payment journeys into a scalable, secure, and resilient architecture supporting omnichannel experiences across in-store POS, e-commerce, mobile, kiosk, and call center environments.

This is a hands-on leadership role with end-to-end ownership of architecture, engineering execution, and platform reliability.

Key Responsibilities

Architecture & Platform Design

• Own and evolve the enterprise payment architecture, including a robust payment abstraction/API layer decoupling business application from processors, gateways, and PSPs
• Design intelligent routing, failover strategies, and orchestration across a multi-vendor ecosystem (e.g., Stripe, Adyen, Braintree, Worldpay, Chase Paymentech)
• Architect unified payment flows across all channels ensuring consistency and scalability
• Define tokenization, encryption, and secure data handling strategies to minimize PCI scope
• Lead design of integrations across REST APIs, webhooks, ISO 8583, EMV, NFC, and 3DS2

Platform Engineering & Delivery

• Lead development of a scalable payment platform using C# and .NET/.NET Core, leveraging native processor capabilities (auth, capture, settlement, refunds, chargebacks, reconciliation)
• Build and standardize internal APIs to orchestrate multiple payment providers through a unified interface
• Oversee integrations with processors, acquiring banks, card networks (Visa, Mastercard), and digital wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay)
• Drive implementation of mPOS, in-app payments, hosted payment solutions, and Text-to-Pay capabilities
• Translate product requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria into scalable technical designs and execution plans

Leadership & Engineering Excellence

• Lead, mentor, and scale a high-performing payments engineering team
• Establish engineering best practices across testing, CI/CD, observability, and incident management
• Partner with Product Owner on sprint planning, backlog refinement, and architectural decisions
• Serve as the primary technical SME for payments across engineering and business stakeholders

Operational Excellence & Optimization

• Build observability frameworks to monitor authorization rates, declines, settlement cycles, and cost optimization
• Implement intelligent retry logic, decline recovery strategies, A/B testing, and dynamic routing
• Lead incident response and post-mortems, driving continuous platform improvements
• Ensure high availability, fault tolerance, and performance at scale

Compliance & Security

• Own technical implementation of PCI-DSS, PSD2, and related compliance standards
• Partner with Security and Compliance teams to maintain audit-ready systems and certifications
• Stay current with evolving payment technologies and regulatory requirements (real-time payments, BNPL, open banking)

Required Qualifications

• 10 years in software engineering, including 5 years in payment systems architecture
• Strong expertise in C# and .NET/.NET Core, with deep knowledge of distributed and event-driven systems
• Proven experience building payment abstraction/orchestration platforms in multi-processor environments
• Hands-on experience with payment integrations across gateways, processors, and acquirers
• Strong knowledge of payment standards: REST, ISO 8583, EMV, NFC, 3DS2, tokenization, and webhooks
• Experience with POS systems and card-present payment flows (EMV, contactless)
• Expertise in digital wallet integrations and tokenization frameworks
• Deep understanding of PCI-DSS and secure payment system design
• Experience with cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud Platform) and messaging systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Service Bus)
• Strong SQL and data modeling experience
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills