Payments Architect

Cortex Consultants LLC; Charlotte (NC); On-site; USD 130,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Cortex Consultants LLC in Charlotte, NC is seeking a Payments Architect with 12+ years of IT experience to design scalable, resilient payment platforms. This hands-on role combines payments domain knowledge with enterprise architecture and leadership across applications, data, infrastructure, and production.

You will guide API, messaging, and event-driven designs, review architectures, mentor teams, and drive best practices in high-volume environments.

Qualifications

• Hands-on engineers who can work across technology layers.
• Strong Java/Spring Boot capabilities with database/Oracle and infrastructure knowledge.
• Experience designing payment processing architectures.

Responsibilities

• Define solution and technical architecture for payment-processing applications.
• Design scalable, highly available and resilient solutions for high-volume payment workloads.
• Provide architecture guidance across application, integration, database, infrastructure, security, and deployment layers.
• Lead technical design reviews and ensure solutions follow enterprise architecture and engineering standards.
• Work closely with Product, Business, Engineering, QA, Infrastructure, Database and Operations teams.
• Guide API, messaging, event-driven and system-integration design.
• Review application architecture and code/design approaches and identify opportunities for performance and reliability improvements.
• Provide technical leadership for production issues, root-cause analysis, performance bottlenecks, and architectural remediation.
• Mentor engineering teams and drive technical best practices.

Skills

Java

Spring Boot

Microservices

REST APIs

Messaging

Oracle/SQL

Distributed systems

Kubernetes/OpenShift

CI/CD

Observability

Security

Production-support

Hands-on reviews

Job description

Payments Architect

Charlotte, NC

Payments Architect with 12+ years of IT experience, with strong architecture experience in Banking / Payments platforms.

Seeking a hands-on Payments Architect to design and drive scalable, resilient, high-performance payment solutions. The candidate should combine strong payments domain knowledge with enterprise application architecture and provide technical leadership across application, integration, data, infrastructure, and production considerations

Roles & Responsibilities

Key Responsibilities

• Define solution and technical architecture for payment-processing applications.
• Design scalable, highly available and resilient solutions for high-volume payment workloads.
• Provide architecture guidance across application, integration, database, infrastructure, security, and deployment layers.
• Lead technical design reviews and ensure solutions follow enterprise architecture and engineering standards.
• Work closely with Product, Business, Engineering, QA, Infrastructure, Database and Operations teams.
• Guide API, messaging, event-driven and system-integration design.
• Review application architecture and code/design approaches and identify opportunities for performance and reliability improvements.
• Provide technical leadership for production issues, root-cause analysis, performance bottlenecks, and architectural remediation.
• Mentor engineering teams and drive technical best practices.

Required Technical Skills

• Strong architecture/design experience with Java, Spring Boot and Microservices.
• Strong understanding of REST APIs, integration patterns and messaging technologies.
• Experience with Oracle/SQL, including database performance considerations.
• Experience designing high-volume, distributed and highly available systems.
• Understanding of cloud/container platforms, preferably Kubernetes/OpenShift.
• Experience with CI/CD, observability, application security and production-support architecture.
• Ability to perform hands-on technical/design reviews rather than operating only at a conceptual architecture level.

The internal client payments discussion specifically calls out strong Java/Spring Boot capabilities along with database/Oracle and infrastructure knowledge, and emphasizes hands-on engineers who can work across technology layers.

Payments Domain Skills

• Strong understanding of end-to-end payment processing.
• Commercial Banking Payments experience preferred.
• Knowledge of ISO 20022 and payment messaging.
• Experience with ACH, Wire, Real-Time Payments and/or SWIFT is desirable.
• Understanding of transaction processing, validations, exception handling, settlement and reconciliation.