Principal Payments Engineer

The role

This Principal Payments Engineer will be the founding hire for the Payments Core team. You will centralize and own the movement of money, including rails, batching, funding, reconciliation, and ledgering.

What you will do

• Guarantee correctness at scale for payment execution.
• Set the internal and external API contract.
• Direct money-movement architecture for multi-rail orchestration.
• Own batching, funding, and reconciliation functions.
• Build reliability and observability through architecture-review and RFC standards.
• Establish practices, review standards, and technical hiring criteria for future payments engineers.

Required qualifications

• 12+ years building production payments or financial systems.
• Direct experience operating at $10s to $100s of billions in GMV.
• Direct experience designing or operating a double-entry ledger in production.
• Direct 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 production load.
• Deep experience with settlement and reconciliation against real external data.
• Experience with multi-rail money movement (ACH, wire, RTP/FedNow, card networks) and multi-FI orchestration.
• Direct integrations with sponsor banks and networks like Visa Direct.

Nice to have

• Prior experience at a payments platform operating at comparable scale, at a company like Stripe, Block/Square, Modern Treasury, Marqeta, or Adyen.
• Experience modernizing or hardening a payments platform at scale.
• Familiarity with PCI DSS, ISO 20022 messaging, and scheme-level settlement file formats.

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Stock options with the potential to unlock more equity as we grow
• Flexible PTO
• Paid parental leave
• Medical, dental, & vision insurance
• 401K
• HSA
• Pre-tax savings programs

Before you apply

• Principals only.
• No external agency submissions.
• Candidates must apply directly; We will not accept submissions from third-party recruiters or staffing agencies.

About the company

Payabli is the Intelligent Fintech Operating System for software platforms. It provides PayFac capabilities, embedded payment acceptance and issuance, and intelligent payment operations.