[Hiring] Principal Payments Engineer @Payabli

Role Description

This is the founding hire for Payments Core - a dedicated team we're standing up to centralize the parts of the platform that cannot fail: the movement of money itself, from rails to batching/funding to reconciliation to ledgering, across hundreds of partners and hundreds of thousands of paypoints. This role owns pulling it into one place, drawing a hard line around it, and holding it to the reliability and correctness standards money movement demands at scale.

You'll be the most senior IC on the team and report to the CTO on an interim basis while we build out the org around you. The test for what belongs in this org is simple: does it stop the movement of funds? If yes, it's core, and it's yours to own.

We're looking for a bar-raiser who's operated payments infrastructure at $10s to $100s of billions in GMV and knows what that scale actually breaks - someone who looks around corners, finds trouble before it finds us, and isn't afraid to challenge orthodoxy when the evidence says we're wrong.

This role rewards an entrepreneurial mindset: comfort with ambiguity, making calls with incomplete information, and taking ownership of outcomes rather than waiting to be told what to build. The choices you make early will be load-bearing for years, and you'll set the technical foundation for the payments engineers we hire after you.

What You'll Do

• Guarantee correctness at scale.
• Set the API contract.
• Direct money-movement architecture.
• Own batching, funding, and reconciliation.
• Build reliability and observability from day one.
• Set the bar for the team.

Qualifications

• 12+ years building production payments or financial systems.
• 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.
• Deep experience with settlement and reconciliation against real external data.
• Experience with multi-rail money movement and multi-FI orchestration.
• A high technical bar set through influence and example.

Nice to Haves

• Prior experience at a payments platform operating at comparable scale.
• 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 and paid parental leave.
• Medical, dental, & vision insurance.
• 401K, HSA, pre-tax savings programs.

Company Description

At Payabli, you'll have a front row seat into building a high-growth venture backed fintech company. As a senior leader in Operations, you'll shape how the organization scales and be the driving force behind our AI-first operations strategy.

• Team Love = Customer Love.
• Run to the Fire.
• Little Things Count.
• Truth Seekers.
• Relentlessly Curious.

Payabli is an equal opportunity employer and values a diverse, inclusive workplace.