Tech Lead - Terminals

Ryft Pay Ltd; Manchester; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

Ryft Pay Ltd is seeking an engineering Tech Lead to own systems bridging physical POS hardware with a scalable payments platform. You will lead architecture for card-present payments, ensuring low latency and secure communication with the AWS backend, while mentoring a squad and shaping technical strategy.

The role spans hands-on coding in C#/.NET, cloud infrastructure, and observability tooling, with emphasis on reliability, scalability and developer experience in an in-person payments

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading technical projects and guiding small teams.
• Deep backend experience; backend is C#/.NET, but other modern typed languages okay.
• Hands-on AWS production experience with distributed services.
• Ability to reason about service boundaries, asynchronous messaging and resilience.
• Experience using AI coding tools while maintaining full ownership of output.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical delivery: architect, build and ship end-to-end features for card-present offering.
• Design hardware-cloud interactions to handle network drops and hardware concurrency.
• Mentor and raise the bar for engineering practices within the squad.
• Own production: instrumentation, alerting and incident response for uptime.
• Harness AI-assisted workflows while keeping full control of code shipped.
• Collaborate daily with managers, vendors, and other squads to enable seamless payments.

Skills

Technical Leadership

Backend Engineering

AWS Production

Distributed Systems

AI Tools

Hardware-Software

Mentoring

Production Ownership

C# / .NET

Communication

Tools

AWS (ECS/Fargate, Lambda)

Terraform

CDK / CloudFormation

CI/CD

Job description

About Ryft

Ryft is a regulated payment facilitator and authorised payment institution building the infrastructure layer for modern commerce platforms.

We enable marketplaces, SaaS platforms and multi-party ecosystems to embed and monetise payments natively. Our technology handles onboarding, compliance, orchestration, split payments and revenue sharing, allowing our partners to focus on growth while we manage complexity.

We are now entering the next phase of scale, expanding into new verticals and building a category-defining embedded payments platform.

About the Job

Are you an engineering leader who wants to own the systems that connect physical point-of-sale hardware to a modern, scalable payments platform?

We are looking for a Tech Lead to head up our Card Present (In-Person Payments) squad. You will lead the technical direction and hands-on delivery of the infrastructure that allows our merchants to take physical payments. You'll work across our C#/.NET backend on AWS, shaping how physical card taps and inserts securely communicate with our event-driven services, split funds, and settle correctly.

This is a hands-on, high-impact leadership role. You won't just be managing a Jira board, you'll be deep in the architecture, writing code, mentoring your squad, and owning the technical strategy for our physical terminal estate. You will bridge the gap between cloud infrastructure and physical hardware, ensuring our in-person payment flows are as robust, scalable, and developer-friendly as our online ones.

What You'll Work On

• In-person payments architecture: Leading the technical design for our card-present estate, ensuring low-latency, highly reliable communication between physical terminals and our AWS backend.

• Terminal & Gateway Integration: Building the critical paths that connect smart payment terminals and Point of Sale (POS) systems into Ryft's core gateway and marketplace routing logic.

• Hardware-to-cloud flows: Handling the unique complexities of physical payments: offline modes, state synchronization, hardware webhooks, and complex failure modes.

• Security & Compliance pipelines: Ensuring our physical payment flows remain airtight and fully compliant within heavily regulated environments.

• Squad Leadership: Setting the technical standard for the Card Present squad. Breaking down complex product requirements into actionable architecture and guiding engineers through delivery.

• The platform itself: Contributing to our broader event-driven C#/.NET service estate, infrastructure-as-code, and observability tooling alongside other Tech Leads.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical delivery: Architect, build, and ship end-to-end features for our card-present offering. You are the ultimate technical owner of what your squad ships.

• Design for hardware-cloud correctness: Write and architect services that behave under network drops, partial failure, and hardware concurrency. Idempotency and absolute accuracy are the job, not edge cases.

• Raise the bar & mentor: Improve the codebase and our engineering practices. Review code rigorously, set conventions, and level up the engineers in your squad.

• Own it in production: Take real ownership of what goes live: instrumentation, alerting, and incident response for a system where physical merchants are relying on your uptime to make a living.

• Harness AI, stay in control: Use AI-assisted workflows to multiply your output (we invest heavily in them) while remaining in full command of every line you ship and review.

• Collaborate: Work day-to-day with your Engineering Manager, Product Managers, hardware vendors, and other squads to deliver seamless omnichannel payment features.

Experience & Skills Required

• Technical Leadership: Proven experience leading technical projects, architecting complex backend systems, and guiding small teams of engineers to deliver high-quality software.

• Strong backend engineering: Significant commercial experience building and running production backend services. Our backend is C#/.NET, so depth there is ideal, but if you're excellent in another modern typed language and will get fluent fast, we want to hear from you.

• AWS in production: Hands-on experience running distributed services on AWS (ECS/Fargate, Lambda, SNS/SQS, DynamoDB or similar) and understanding the operational reality that comes with them.

• Distributed systems judgement: Comfortable reasoning about service boundaries, asynchronous messaging, eventual consistency, and building resilient systems that handle downstream provider outages.

• AI-augmented, engineer-first: You use AI coding tools effectively to move faster, but you review, understand, and take full ownership of the output. We are not looking for someone who ships code they can't explain.

• Fast, self-directed learner: A track record of getting productive quickly in unfamiliar domains. Enthusiasm to master the complexities of hardware-software interactions matters more to us than knowing it all on day one.

Nice to Have

• POS & Terminal Integration: Existing experience integrating physical payment terminals, card readers, or Point of Sale (POS) systems into payment gateways.

• Android Experience: Familiarity with Android development, specifically in the context of building or maintaining applications for smart payment terminals.

• PCI-DSS & Compliance: Deep understanding of payment scheme rules, PCI-DSS compliance, EMV standards, or Point-to-Point Encryption (P2PE).

• Infrastructure ownership: Infrastructure-as-code (CloudFormation, CDK, or Terraform), CI/CD pipelines, and containerisation.

Why Ryft? If you want to build the systems that move money in a fast-paced, collaborative environment, we'd love to hear from you. We value engineers who care about the craft, speak up with their ideas, and take pride in what they ship. You'll join a team where your voice is heard, your work matters, and there's plenty of room to grow.