Job Description

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 idempotency, saga, and reconciliation patterns
• PCI DSS and tokenization experience
• Observability design using OpenTelemetry or an APM platform
• History of getting multiple engineering teams aligned on a common architecture

Nice to Have

• Temporal Nexus or Worker Versioning
• SNAP / WIC payment processing
• Apple Pay and Google Pay
• Processor APIs such as Aurus, Adyen, Fiserv, Worldpay, or Chase
• Network tokenization, DPAN, multi-capture, and marketplace settlement
• Multi-cloud (Azure and GCP)
• LaunchDarkly or similar feature-flag tooling
• .NET Aspire, Testcontainers, Mockoon, or WireMock
• Retail finance data (transaction logs, sales audit, general ledger)
• Grocery or omnichannel retail background