About the Opportunity
Our client, an innovative fintech firm, is seeking a Lead Engineer of Financial Payments (Java) to join their core technology team in New York City. This hands-on leadership role combines technical roadmapping, solution architecture, and management of distributed development teams to deliver scalable, secure payment processing systems.
The annual base salary range is $180,000 to $210,000. Actual compensation offered to the successful candidate may vary from posted hiring range based upon geographic location, work experience, education, and/or skill level, among other things. Details about eligibility for bonus compensation (if applicable) will be finalized at the time of offer.
Job Responsibilities
- Lead and mentor a team of engineers, overseeing feature development, code reviews, and technical quality across both local and offshore teams
- Design and architect secure, highly scalable payment systems with Java, AWS, and cloud-native tech
- Drive technical decision-making, enforce engineering standards, and foster cross-team collaboration
- Ensure payment solutions comply with security standards and financial industry regulations (PCI-DSS, SOC2, etc.)
- Collaborate with product, infrastructure, and executive stakeholders to deliver payments integrations and enhancements
- Own the technical roadmap for the payment infrastructure
- Manage incident response, technical troubleshooting, and long-term system reliability
- Balance feature delivery against technical debt and system health
- Promote effective engineering practices for distributed teams and cross-functional initiatives
Job Requirements
- 10+ years of software engineering experience with deep expertise in Java; exposure to Node.js and Python a plus
- 3-5+ years in a technical leadership role managing geographically distributed teams
- Experience building on AWS (Lambda, Step Functions, ECS/EKS)
- Strong grounding in event-driven architectures and serverless computing patterns
- Expertise with high-availability, low-latency systems, microservices, and container architecture (Kubernetes)
- Financial services, payment systems, or regulated industry background preferred
- Excellent written and verbal communication; proven success leading offshore and cross-functional teams
- Demonstrated history of delivering secure, complex, mission-critical software products
Preferred Skills
- Knowledge of payment protocols (ISO20022, SWIFT, ACH, card networks)
- Experience with AWS Step Functions and workflow orchestration
- Familiarity with event sourcing, distributed systems, and observability tools (DataDog, New Relic, CloudWatch)
- Hands-on exposure to CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, CloudFormation)
- Deep understanding of security best practices for financial applications
Technical Environment
- Languages: Java (primary), Python, JavaScript
- Cloud: AWS (Lambda, Step Functions, ECS, EKS, S3, RDS)
- Orchestration: Kubernetes
- Architecture: Microservices, event-driven, serverless
