Principal Payments Engineer

Payabli is a next-generation Payments Infrastructure and Monetization Platform purpose-built for vertical software companies. Through a single, developer-friendly API with low-code embedded payment components, Payabli enables platforms to seamlessly embed, monetize, and operationalize payments—making payments a core part of their platform and business model. By unifying payment acceptance, payment issuance, and advanced payment operations tooling, Payabli empowers software companies to manage and move money through a single infrastructure stack that delivers total control over the payments experience. Built to scale with PCI DSS 4.0 and SOC 2-compliant security, Payabli’s infrastructure delivers enterprise-grade reliability and trust while leveraging AI-driven intelligence to enhance visibility, streamline operations, and drive revenue growth. Backed by leading fintech investors including QED Investors, Fika Ventures, TTV Capital, and Bling Capital, Payabli is setting the standard for embedded payments infrastructure powering the next generation of vertical SaaS. This Principal Payments Engineer 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 work happens today, distributed across the org and coupled to lower-blast-radius concerns. 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, including ours, 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 both for the payments engineers we hire after you and for the engineers already working in these areas today. What You'll Do - Guarantee correctness at scale. Define how the platform guarantees a payment executes exactly once, even under partial failure, retries, and cross-service races - and make that guarantee a first-class, testable property of the system, not a convention people are trusted to follow. - Set the API contract. Design the internal/external API surface partners and internal teams both build against - versioning, backward compatibility, webhook delivery guarantees - so there's no split between what we use internally and what partners get. - Direct money-movement architecture. Set the direction for multi-rail orchestration (ACH, wire, RTP/FedNow, card networks) across multiple financial institutions, including direct connections to our sponsor banks and networks like Visa Direct, and how the platform routes, retries, and fails over rails and FIs. - Own batching, funding, and reconciliation. These are the functions where a broken promise gets noticed fastest - partners feel it directly when funding is late or reconciliation doesn't match. Bring the same rigor here as anywhere else in the platform: accurate matching against external settlement data, fast exception handling, and no surprises. - Build reliability and observability from day one. Establish the architecture-review and RFC standards, plus the monitoring and alerting, that let us catch trouble before it takes down live payment processing - not after. - Set the bar for the team. Establish the practices, review standards, and technical hiring criteria the payments engineers who join after you will be held to. You're setting the bar, not just clearing it. What We're Looking For - These are the core requirements for the role. We don't expect every candidate to check all of them, but this is a senior bar and we're looking for genuine depth across most. - 12+ years building production payments or financial systems, with direct experience operating at $10s to $100s of billions in GMV and a track record of owning architecture and seeing big decisions through to production. - Direct experience designing or operating a double-entry ledger in production - you can speak fluently to derived balances, hot-account partitioning, and schema evolution under load. - Direct experience building idempotent, exactly-once payment flows in real-time, high-throughput systems, and can describe concretely how you held correctness under load - when a retry landed on a different instance than the original request, or when a database write failed after a payment had already been authorized. - Experience designing distributed data architecture and petabyte-scale storage systems, and building high-throughput services that hold sub-50ms latency under real production load. - Deep experience with settlement and reconciliation against real external data - bank files, card network settlement, ACH returns - treating mismatch detection as core system design, not an afterthought. - Experience with multi-rail money movement (ACH, wire, RTP/FedNow, card networks) and multi-FI orchestration, including direct integrations with sponsor banks and networks like Visa Direct rather than only processor intermediaries. - A high technical bar set through influence and example. You make the work and the people around you better, and you're as comfortable in the codebase as you are in a design review. Nice to Haves - 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 - taking existing, load-bearing systems and rebuilding them into best-in-class infrastructure without stopping the money. - Familiarity with PCI DSS, ISO 20022 messaging, and scheme-level settlement file formats. We think you'll love being part of our team because 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 — directly influencing how we build, automate, and optimize for the future. You'll stretch yourself every day, learn a ton, grow alongside the company, and have a lot of fun building Payabli with us. We're a values driven company that cares deeply about our team, partners, and customers. Our north star values are:   🤝 Team Love = Customer Love — You understand that when you build great products for your internal partners, they deliver exceptional experiences to merchants. You obsess over the platform partners and businesses that depend on every payout landing on time. 🔥 Run to the Fire — When ACH returns spike or a card program hits a snag, you're the first one in the war room. You don't shy away from hard problems—you chase them. You volunteer for the complex, messy challenges others avoid. 🔍 Little Things Count — You sweat the details because you know a single decimal error in a payout can damage a business. You double-check edge cases, validate every assumption, and understand that excellence lives in the details. 💎 Truth Seekers — You give direct feedback, receive it with grace, and never let ego get in the way of finding the right answer. You document what you don't know, admit mistakes quickly, and hold yourself accountable in the open. 🚀 Relentlessly Curious — You're constantly asking "what if?" and "why not?" You study how competitors solve problems, explore adjacent industries for inspiration, and never stop learning about the payments ecosystem.   We build technology that gets noticed and a workplace where people want to grow their careers. Our work has been recognized by some of the industry’s most respected organizations, including being named No. 43 on the 2026 Inc. 5000, marking our third consecutive year on the list. Payabli was also named to the 2026 Forbes Fintech 50, recognizing the most innovative private companies in financial technology, Inc.’s 2025 Best Workplaces, and Built In’s 2026 Best Places to Work in Miami.   WHAT WE CAN OFFER YOU - 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   Payabli is an equal opportunity employer and values a diverse, inclusive workplace.   Principals only. No external agency submissions. Candidates must apply directly; We will not accept submissions from third-party recruiters or staffing agencies.