Payment Engineering Lead

We are looking for a heavy-hitting Engineering Lead to own the technical architecture and delivery of our global payment platform. In the travel industry, payments are uniquely high-stakes: they involve complex "split-funding" between agencies and airlines, high-value transactions, and a web of global regulations. You will lead a department of software engineers and architects to build a resilient, low-latency infrastructure that moves billions of dollars annually.

Core Responsibilities

1. Technical Architecture & Roadmap

• Design and scale a high-concurrency payment gateway capable of handling peak travel season traffic without degradation.
• Transition legacy monolithic payment paths into a modular, microservices-based architecture to support rapid deployment of new payment methods.

2. Engineering Excellence & Leadership

• Manage and mentor a multi-squad engineering organization, championing a culture of Test-Driven Development (TDD) and automated CI/CD.
• Oversee the integration of complex APIs from global providers and travel-specific systems.
• Drive the adoption of modern tech stacks (e.g., Golang, Java/Spring Boot, Kubernetes, Kafka) for real-time transaction processing.

3. Security, Compliance & Optimization

• Implement sophisticated Idempotency keys and "Circuit Breaker" patterns to manage flaky downstream provider APIs.

Technical Requirements

• Distributed Systems: Expert-level knowledge of distributed systems, eventual consistency, and ACID properties in the context of financial ledgers.
• Payment Protocols: Hands-on experience with JSON-based payment APIs, and OAuth2 security frameworks.
• Travel Tech Stack: Familiarity with NDC (New Distribution Capability) and the technical nuances of "Merchant of Record" vs. "Agency" payment flows.
• Performance Engineering: Proven ability to optimize database queries and cache layers to keep p99 latency under 200ms for global checkouts.