Principal Engineer - Payments Products & Platform

Required

• Distributed Systems Design

  Proven expertise designing and operating large-scale distributed systems in production environments, managing trade-offs between reliability, performance, scalability, and operational cost. Experience architecting systems handling high transaction volumes and complex state management across multiple services.

• API-First Architecture

  Deep proficiency designing product-agnostic APIs that serve multiple consumer teams and platforms. Experience building RESTful or event-driven architectures, API versioning strategies, and ensuring API contracts maintain backward compatibility while supporting innovation.

• Backend Languages

  Fluency in at least one modern backend language such as C#, Java, Go, or C++. Demonstrated ability to make informed technology choices based on performance requirements, team expertise, and architectural constraints specific to payments and fintech systems.

• Database Design

  Strong experience with both SQL and NoSQL data stores, including schema design for high-throughput systems, query optimization, transaction consistency models (ACID, eventual consistency), and data migration strategies. Understanding of ledger systems and financial data integrity requirements.

• Cloud Infrastructure

  Hands-on expertise with AWS cloud-native platforms, including compute services, managed databases, messaging, and monitoring. Experience designing cost-effective architectures at scale and managing multi-environment deployments with infrastructure-as-code principles.

• Payments & Fintech Domain Knowledge

  Deep understanding of payment systems architecture, payment flows, regulatory compliance, reconciliation processes, and settlement mechanics. Experience working with payment processors, gateway integrations, and understanding of financial risk management.

• Technical Leadership & Mentorship

  Demonstrated ability to mentor senior and staff engineers, shape architectural decisions through influence rather than authority, and set engineering standards across distributed teams. Evidence of driving cross-functional technical initiatives and raising engineering practice organization-wide.

• Legacy System Modernization

  Proven track record making pragmatic decisions on which legacy systems to extend, migrate, or rebuild. Experience managing technical debt, executing incremental migrations, and balancing greenfield innovation with brownfield maintenance.

• AI/ML Integration

  Strong interest and demonstrated capability in evaluating and integrating AI tooling into engineering workflows and product features. Experience using AI for task automation, code generation, and improving engineering productivity and outcomes.

Preferred

• Microservices Architecture

  Nice to have

  Extensive experience designing, implementing, and operating microservices architectures in production, including service boundaries, inter-service communication patterns, observability, and deployment strategies.

• Growth Analytics & A/B Testing

  Nice to have

  Hands-on experience designing and analyzing A/B tests that drive product adoption and usage. Understanding of experimentation frameworks, statistical rigor, and the relationship between technical implementation and product experimentation velocity.

• Multi-region & Global Systems

  Nice to have

  Experience architecting systems across geographic regions with considerations for data sovereignty, latency optimization, and eventually consistent data models. Understanding of payment rails and settlement across different markets.

• Provider Integrations

  Nice to have

  Experience integrating with external payment providers, gateway APIs, and third-party financial services. Understanding of rate limiting, error handling, and maintaining resilience when depending on external services.

• Observability & Monitoring

  Nice to have

  Expertise implementing comprehensive observability practices including structured logging, distributed tracing, metrics, and alerting. Experience diagnosing production issues in high-frequency transaction systems with minimal downtime.

• Open Source Contribution

  Nice to have

  Active participation in open source projects, demonstrating commitment to community engineering standards and ability to write code for external consumption and peer review.