We’re looking for a hands-on architect to lead the payments area of a large-scale digital commerce platform. You’ll be responsible for how every online order gets paid for, from the first authorization through adjustments, capture, and refunds, across card, SNAP, and WIC tenders.
You’ll shape a platform built on Temporal, Kafka, and Azure, with the goal that no payment is ever lost, duplicated, or left unreconciled, even when a processor stops responding or a process breaks midway. You’ll also set the standards the teams follow for versioning, monitoring, fault tolerance, and card-data security.
This isn’t an ivory-tower position. You’ll build prototypes and reference code, review pull requests, and coach senior developers. You’ll also serve as the technical lead in conversations with processors, benefit program partners, and the finance organization, and work alongside the pricing, ordering, and fulfillment teams so that payment data flows accurately all the way into the books.
Responsibilities
Ownership & Direction
Set the technical vision and roadmap for payments and make the major design calls
Draw clear lines around what payments owns, and establish a common model and terminology
Assign each business function to the right service or workflow
Produce architecture review documents and decision records
Design
Create payment operations that are safe to retry and never execute twice, using patterns such as sagas, compensating actions, transactional outbox/inbox, and reconciliation
Define interfaces and event schemas shared with neighboring teams (OpenAPI, JSON Schema, Protobuf)
Clarify which systems produce data, which verify it, and what downstream consumers can trust
Workflow & Event Architecture
Implement long-running workflows in Temporal, including cross-team calls through Nexus
Establish safe upgrade practices for in-flight workflows (patching, build IDs, replay tests)
Model Kafka events with governed schemas, retry handling, and dead-letter routing
Payment Processing
Design payment handling for each stage of an order: placement, changes, cancellation, completion, and returns
Coordinate orders paid with more than one tender, including card, SNAP, and WIC
Lead integrations with processors and benefit providers covering authorizations, captures, voids, refunds, and reversals
Resolve uncertain or timed-out transactions without charging customers twice or leaving orphaned holds
Keep SNAP and WIC handling aligned with federal USDA and state-level requirements
Shrink PCI footprint through tokenization (network tokens, DPAN), encryption, and key rotation
Add new payment options such as mobile wallets and split payments
Enable third-party marketplace payments, including multiple captures, over-capture limits, and split settlement
Work with finance on reconciliation, transaction log reporting, and ledger accuracy
Set and track service targets for authorization, capture, refund, and recovery success
Reliability & Testing
Engineer fault tolerance using Polly and Temporal retry configuration
Keep authorization latency comfortably inside checkout time limits across Azure and GCP
Implement end-to-end tracing across APIs, Kafka, and Temporal using OpenTelemetry
Own the test approach: unit, contract, replay, simulated gateways, and performance testing
Technical Leadership
Conduct code reviews and develop senior engineering talent
Retire legacy flows through controlled, feature-flagged rollouts
Apply AI-assisted development tools to speed up delivery
Must Have
10+ years in software engineering, with at least 5 years focused on payments
Strong domain-driven design background (bounded contexts, domain events, context mapping)
Deep, current, hands-on C# and .NET 8+ skills
Production use of Temporal or a comparable durable workflow platform
Production use of Kafka
Azure platform services (App Service, Cosmos DB, API Management, Key Vault) or GCP equivalents
Containerized applications running on Kubernetes
Real-world implementation of…