Tech Lead - Credit Card Payment Engineering

Responsibilities:

Architect and lead the implementation of scalable, fault-tolerant card payment processing systems.
Design systems aligned with: Four-party model (Visa/Mastercard), Three-party model (Amex/Discover)
Own the full transaction lifecycle: Real-time authorization, Batch clearing, and Settlement and fund movements
Implement resilient routing strategies, redundancy, and failover mechanisms.
Lead integrations with: Acquiring banks, Card networks, Payment gateways, Fraud providers, Tokenization services
Architect and maintain automated reconciliation frameworks that: Match authorization, clearing, and settlement records. Reconcile internal ledgers with acquirer and network reports. Detect mismatches, duplicates, and missing transactions
Design systems to ensure ledger consistency and idempotency
Build safeguards to prevent revenue leakage
Implement transaction state tracking across the entire lifecycle
Ensure systems are audit-ready and compliant with financial controls
Design and maintain payment reporting systems including: Authorization rate reports, Settlement reconciliation reports, Fee and interchange breakdown reports, Chargeback and dispute metrics
Build internal dashboards for: Financial performance, Cost optimization, and Risk monitoring
Implement threshold-based alerting systems, including: Authorization rate drops, Abnormal decline patterns, Settlement mismatches, Volume anomalies, and Chargeback ratio spikes
Define and implement escalation paths for: Acquirer outages, Network disruptions, Fraud spikes, and Reconciliation failures
Partner with Finance and Risk to define monitoring thresholds and response playbooks.
Ensure compliance with: PCI DSS, Card network operating regulations, Data encryption and tokenization standards
Design secure card vaulting and tokenization solutions.
Integrate fraud detection systems and risk scoring engines.
Support 3D Secure and SCA frameworks.
Collaborate on chargeback prevention and representation workflows.
Lead and mentor a team of payment engineers.
Establish best practices for: Reliability engineering, Transaction idempotency, Distributed systems design, Observability and monitoring, and Incident response
Drive documentation standards for payment flows and financial controls.
Partner cross-functionally with Product, Finance, Risk, and Compliance.
Act as the internal SME for card payments and guide engineering decisions based on domain knowledge.

Qualifications & Skills:

8+ years of software engineering experience.
3+ years designing or operating card payment processing systems at scale.
Proven hands-on experience with: Authorization, clearing, and settlement flows, Four-party and three-party models, Interchange and fee structures, and Chargeback lifecycle
Experience building or maintaining: Automated reconciliation systems, Payment ledgers, Financial reporting pipelines, Alerting and threshold monitoring systems
Strong understanding of PCI DSS and payment security standards.
Experience designing high-availability, distributed systems.
Demonstrated understanding of: Card network rules (Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover), Issuer and acquirer roles, BIN ranges, MCC codes, AVS, CVV, 3D Secure and Strong Customer Authentication, Authorization optimization strategies, Chargeback lifecycle and dispute workflows, Interchange fees, assessments, and acquirer markups, Cost optimization and routing logic based on fee economics

Nice to Have:

Experience at a PSP, acquirer, issuer, or fintech platform.
Experience optimizing authorization rates and routing strategies.
Familiarity with global payments and cross-border processing.
Experience managing high transaction volumes (10M+ monthly transactions).
Exposure to audit processes and financial compliance reviews.