Principal Payments Engineer
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Job Description
Principal Payments Engineer building Payabli’s core embedded payments infrastructure. Owning exactly-once money movement, multi-rail orchestration, reconciliation, and ledger reliability at scale.
Responsibilities:
- Serve as the founding hire for the Payments Core team
- Centralize and own the platform components responsible for movement of money, from payment rails through batching, funding, reconciliation, and ledgering
- Define how the platform guarantees exactly-once payment execution under partial failures, retries, and cross-service races
- Design the internal and external API surface, including versioning, backward compatibility, and webhook delivery guarantees
- Direct multi-rail orchestration across ACH, wire, RTP/FedNow, and card networks
- Define routing, retry, and failover across financial institutions and payment rails, including sponsor banks and networks such as Visa Direct
- Own batching, funding, and reconciliation with accurate external settlement matching and rapid exception handling
- Establish architecture-review and RFC standards, monitoring, and alerting for reliability and observability
- Set engineering practices, review standards, and technical hiring criteria for the Payments Core team
- Report to the CTO on an interim basis while the organization is built out
Requirements:
- 12+ years building production payments or financial systems
- Direct experience operating at $10s to $100s of billions in GMV
- Track record of owning architecture and seeing big decisions through to production
- Direct experience designing or operating a double-entry ledger in production
- Fluency in derived balances, hot-account partitioning, and schema evolution under load
- Experience building idempotent, exactly-once payment flows in real-time, high-throughput systems
- Experience designing distributed data architecture and petabyte-scale storage systems
- Experience building high-throughput services with sub-50ms latency under real production load
- Deep experience with settlement and reconciliation against external data, including bank files, card network settlement, and ACH returns
- Experience with multi-rail money movement: ACH, wire, RTP/FedNow, and card networks
- Experience with multi-financial-institution orchestration, including direct integrations with sponsor banks and networks such as Visa Direct
- High technical bar demonstrated through influence and example
- Nice to have: experience at a comparable-scale payments platform such as Stripe, Block/Square, Modern Treasury, Marqeta, or Adyen
- Nice to have: experience modernizing or hardening a payments platform at scale
- Nice to have: familiarity with PCI DSS, ISO 20022 messaging, and scheme-level settlement file formats
- Must be legally authorized to work in the United States
Benefits:
- Stock options with the potential to unlock more equity as we grow
- Flexible PTO and paid parental leave
- Medical, dental, & vision insurance
- 401K, HSA, pre-tax savings programs
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