Principal Payments Engineer

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

📋 Description

• Act as the inaugural member of the Payments Core team

• Centralize and take ownership of the platform components that facilitate the movement of funds, spanning payment rails, batching, funding, reconciliation, and ledgering

• Establish mechanisms that ensure exactly-once payment execution amidst partial failures, retries, and cross-service races

• Design both internal and external API interfaces, incorporating versioning, backward compatibility, and guarantees for webhook delivery

• Oversee multi-rail orchestration that includes ACH, wire, RTP/FedNow, and card networks

• Define routing, retry protocols, and failover strategies across financial institutions and payment rails, including sponsor banks and networks like Visa Direct

• Manage batching, funding, and reconciliation ensuring accurate external settlement matching and swift exception handling

• Implement architecture-review and RFC standards, along with monitoring and alerting systems for reliability and observability

• Establish engineering practices, review standards, and criteria for technical hiring within the Payments Core team

• Report to the CTO in an interim capacity during the organizational development phase

⛳️ Requirements

• 12+ years of experience in building production payments or financial systems

• Hands-on experience managing systems with $10s to $100s of billions in GMV

• Proven track record of owning architectural decisions and successfully implementing them into production

• Direct experience in designing or operating a double-entry ledger in a production environment

• Proficiency in derived balances, hot-account partitioning, and schema evolution under load

• Experience in creating idempotent, exactly-once payment flows in real-time, high-throughput systems

• Knowledge in designing distributed data architectures and managing petabyte-scale storage systems

• Proven experience in building high-throughput services with sub-50ms latency under real production load

• Extensive experience with settlement and reconciliation processes against external data, including bank files, card network settlements, and ACH returns

• Familiarity with multi-rail money movement mechanisms: ACH, wire, RTP/FedNow, and card networks

• Experience in orchestrating across multiple financial institutions, including direct integrations with sponsor banks and networks such as Visa Direct

• High technical standards demonstrated through influence and exemplary work

• Nice to have: experience with a payments platform at a similar scale, such as Stripe, Block/Square, Modern Treasury, Marqeta, or Adyen

• Nice to have: experience in modernizing or strengthening a payments platform at scale

• Nice to have: knowledge of PCI DSS, ISO 20022 messaging, and scheme-level settlement file formats

• Must possess legal authorization to work in the United States

🏝️ Benefits

• Stock options with the opportunity to unlock additional equity as the company grows

• Flexible PTO and paid parental leave

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance

• 401K, HSA, and pre-tax savings programs