Lead Engineer Financial Payments

About the Role

We are seeking an experienced Lead Engineer to join our financial payments technology team in NYC. You will lead a distributed engineering team drive technical excellence and build scalable secure payment processing systems. This role combines hands on development with technical leadership across both local and offshore teams.

Key Responsibilities

Lead and mentor a team of internal engineers (early to mid-career) and coordinate with 3 offshore teams across two continents

Design and architect scalable secure payment processing solutions using Java AWS and cloud-native technologies

Drive technical decision-making and enforce engineering best practices across distributed teams

Ensure compliance with financial industry regulations and security standards (PCI-DSS SOC2 etc.)

Collaborate with product managers and stakeholders to deliver payment features and integrations

Own the technical roadmap for payment processing infrastructure

Conduct code reviews and maintain high code quality standards across all teams

Manage technical debt while balancing feature delivery

Foster collaboration and communication across time zones and cultures

Participate in incident response and system reliability improvements

Required Qualifications

10 years of software engineering experience specializing in Java with strong proficiency in and Python

5 years in a technical leadership role managing distributed teams

Experience with AWS services (Lambda Step Functions ECS/EKS)

Knowledge of event-driven architectures and serverless patterns

Experience in financial services payments or regulated industries

Understanding of payment processing transaction systems or fintech

Strong system design skills for high-availability low-latency systems

Experience with microservices architecture and container orchestration (Kubernetes)

Excellent communication skills for managing offshore teams

Proven track record of delivering complex mission-critical systems

Preferred Qualifications

Knowledge of payment protocols (ISO20022 SWIFT ACH card networks)

Experience with AWS Step Functions for workflow orchestration

Background in distributed systems and event sourcing

Familiarity with observability tools (DataDog New Relic CloudWatch)

Experience with CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code (Terraform CloudFormation)

Understanding of security best practices in financial systems

Technical Environment

Languages: Java (primary) Python Javascript

Cloud: AWS (Lambda Step Functions ECS EKS S3 RDS etc.)

Orchestration: Kubernetes AWS Step Functions

Architecture: Microservices event-driven serverless