Lead Engineer Backend Platform Financial Payments

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 What We Offer Competitive salary and equity package Hybrid work model (NYC office) Comprehensive health benefits Opportunity to shape payment infrastructure at scale Collaborative culture with global team exposure Location New York City - Hybrid