Global Payments Architect – Cross-Border & Digital Assets

Early Warning (Zelle); San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 185,000 - 235,000; Full time

Job summary

Early Warning (Zelle) is seeking a senior engineering leader to shape and own the technical strategy for cross-border and digital asset payment capabilities. You will guide architecture, patterns, and implementation across distributed platforms while mentoring engineers and driving collaboration with product, design, and other engineering groups.

The role emphasizes secure, scalable, compliant global payment solutions, leading technical decisions, and improving engineering standards and DevOps

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or related field.
• Twelve or more years of relevant related experience.
• Nine or more years of experience in distributed systems, SaaS, cloud solutions, micro services.
• Hands-on Docker experience.
• Proven experience leading design and evolution of large-scale payment platforms in regulated environments.
• Deep technical understanding of digital asset or stablecoin-based systems.
• Two+ years of front-end development (Angular/React).
• Eight+ years of experience with Java/Spring; Maven/Gradle proficiency.
• Experience delivering business-critical systems to market.
• Ability to influence across multiple departments and teams.
• Experience with event-driven architectures and messaging (Pub/Sub, Kafka, RabbitMQ).
• Cloud experience (GCP, AWS, Azure).
• Knowledge of SDLC, Agile/Lean, DevOps.

Responsibilities

• Shape engineering approaches with product and architecture.
• Own technical strategy for cross-border money movement and digital asset settlement.
• Architect cross-border and scalable payment platforms.
• Resolve complex scaling challenges across distributed systems.
• Mentor engineers and improve security, resilience, and compliance.
• Define department-wide design patterns and code approaches.
• Review code effectiveness from multiple teams.
• Lead architectural decisions and resolve conflicts across teams.
• Drive architecture, design, prototyping, and implementation for product needs.
• Collaborate with product managers and designers to build new features.
• Own features or systems and ensure long-term health of surrounding systems.
• Support operations teams in production issue resolution.
• Develop tests to ensure quality, performance, and scalability.
• Mentor other engineers and lead cross-functional projects.
• Improve engineering practices, tooling, and processes.
• Contribute to risk management and data security commitments.

Skills

Java/Spring

Distributed systems

Docker

Kubernetes

Cloud platforms

SDLC/DevOps

Security/reliability

Event-driven architecture

Front-end (React/Angular)

Leadership/mentorship

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related field

MS or PhD (preferred)

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Kafka/RabbitMQ

Pub/Sub

Job description

Early Warning (Zelle) is seeking a senior engineering leader to shape and own the technical strategy for cross-border and digital asset payment capabilities. You will guide architecture, patterns, and implementation across distributed platforms while mentoring engineers and driving collaboration with product, design, and other engineering groups.

The role emphasizes secure, scalable, compliant global payment solutions, leading technical decisions, and improving engineering standards and DevOps