# Principal Payments Engineer

**Company:** [Payabli](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/payabli)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Experience:** 12+ years
**Skills:** Payment Processing, Double-Entry Ledger, Distributed Systems, Idempotency, API Design, Webhook Delivery, Ach, Rtp, Fednow, Visa Direct, Reconciliation, Pci Dss, Iso 20022, Petabyte-Scale Storage, Observability
**Posted:** 2026-09-04

> Founding senior engineer responsible for creating and operating Payabli’s Payments Core infrastructure, including ledgers, exactly-once money movement, multi-rail orchestration, settlement, and reconciliation. Requires 12+ years of production payments or financial-systems experience at major scale.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Establish correctness guarantees for payment execution, including exactly-once behavior under partial failures, retries, and cross-service races.
- Design internal and external APIs, including versioning, backward compatibility, and webhook delivery guarantees.
- Direct multi-rail money-movement architecture across ACH, wire, RTP/FedNow, and card networks, including sponsor-bank and Visa Direct integrations.
- Own batching, funding, settlement matching, reconciliation, and exception handling.
- Establish reliability, monitoring, alerting, architecture-review, and RFC standards for live payment processing.
- Set engineering practices, code-review standards, and technical hiring criteria for the Payments Core team.

## Requirements
- 12+ years building production payments or financial systems.
- Experience operating at tens to hundreds of billions in GMV and owning architecture through production.
- Production experience designing or operating double-entry ledgers, including derived balances, hot-account partitioning, and schema evolution under load.
- Experience building idempotent, exactly-once payment flows in real-time, high-throughput systems.
- Distributed data architecture and petabyte-scale storage experience.
- Experience building high-throughput services with sub-50ms latency under production load.
- Deep experience with settlement and reconciliation using bank files, card-network settlement data, and ACH returns.
- Experience with multi-rail money movement and multi-financial-institution orchestration, including direct sponsor-bank and network integrations.
- Strong technical leadership through influence and example, with hands-on coding and design-review experience.

## Nice to Have
- Experience at a payments platform of comparable scale, such as Stripe, Block/Square, Modern Treasury, Marqeta, or Adyen.
- Experience modernizing or hardening load-bearing payments platforms without interrupting money movement.
- Familiarity with PCI DSS, ISO 20022, and scheme-level settlement file formats.

## Compensation and Benefits
- Opportunity to help build a high-growth, venture-backed fintech company and establish its Payments Core organization.
- Values-driven team focused on customers, ownership, operational excellence, direct feedback, and continuous learning.

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