Principal Engineer, Payments Infrastructure

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Take charge of the design and progression of essential payment infrastructure, encompassing tokenization, wallets, processor integrations, routing, authorization, and reliability.

• Report directly to the CTO while functioning as an active principal engineer within the payments pod.

• Advance integrations with processors, gateways, vaults, and partner checkouts, including Adyen, NMI, VGS, Spreedly, and Stripe Connect.

• Introduce new payment mechanisms while ensuring transactional behavior remains consistent, observable, and testable.

• Lead the payments product strategy from initial discovery to implementation, involving merchant discussions, data analysis, roadmap development, specifications, execution, and post-launch metrics.

• Create dashboards for merchants and agents that facilitate routing, salvage, MID health, threshold breaches, routing adjustments, and one-click resolutions.

• Enhance the payments setup enabling merchants to finalize it independently, without the need for support tickets.

• Manage the entire tokenization and credential lifecycle, which includes capture, provisioning, storage, transactions, updates, and expirations.

• Oversee payment method portability, covering Apple Pay and Google Pay provisioning, domain verification, provider configuration, and limitations on credential migration.

• Boost approval rates by implementing decline taxonomy, salvage strategies, retries, cascading, 3DS, BIN and routing strategies, card updater, and instrumentation.

• Manage the data ingestion, normalization, and operational systems for disputes, chargebacks, fraud notifications, and card-brand monitoring.

• Ensure merchants and MIDs stay below monitoring thresholds while providing signals for routing, authorization, and forecasting.

• Take ownership of payment-path SLOs, telemetry, on-call responsibilities, and incident response.

• Implement idempotency and reconciliation processes against processor settlements.

• Maintain clean, tested, and documented code, alongside ADRs / RFCs, while operating within an agentic software development lifecycle continuously assessed for PCI compliance.

• Collaborate directly with merchants and processor partners, prioritizing business outcomes over ticket management.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of experience in building and delivering production software.

• Principal-level influence as a hands-on engineer who is actively writing application code.

• Proven product judgment with a track record of determining development priorities based on direct customer feedback.

• Extensive payments experience within a payments organization, such as a PSP, gateway, vault, orchestration layer, or money movement platform.

• Practical experience with token vaults.

• Ownership of production processes for Apple Pay and Google Pay provisioning, merchant configuration, and domain verification.

• Ability to understand cryptograms, network tokens, network transaction IDs, and PCI scope from fundamental principles.

• Experience in migrating stored credentials and wallet tokens between different providers, vaults, or processors.

• Familiarity with integrating and operating across multiple acquirers, gateways, or PSPs simultaneously, including routing strategies.

• Knowledge in decline analysis, retry strategies, 3DS, and enhancing approval rate metrics.

• Experience managing chargeback processes, representment, TC40 / SAFE fraud reporting, and card-brand monitoring programs such as VAMP and equivalent Mastercard programs.

• Understanding of idempotent payment operations, ledger or system-of-record design, and reconciliation against processor settlements.

• Experience handling production payment incidents, including detection, containment, merchant communication, and financial remediation.

• Daily coding experience with AI tools like Claude Code or similar agentic setups.

• Strong commercial fluency and excellent communication skills.

• Familiarity with ADRs / RFCs and enhancing engineering standards.

• Preferred: Experience in payment orchestration or multi-PayFac platforms.

• Preferred: Experience with high-risk or direct response merchant portfolios.

• Preferred: Experience with subscription and recurring billing at scale.

• Preferred: Experience with alternative payment methods and BNPL integrations.

• Preferred: Experience as an engineer in PCI DSS v4 assessments.

🏝️ Benefits

• Full-time employee position.

• Remote work opportunity within the U.S.

• Chance to contribute to a category-defining AI commerce platform.

• Direct influence over payments product direction and outcomes.

• Opportunity to leverage AI agents daily to enhance team productivity.

• Collaborate with seasoned operators and investors.

• Strong ownership, autonomy, and accountability in your role.