Payments Solution Architect

Encore Talent Solutions; Missouri; On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Encore Talent Solutions is seeking a deeply technical, customer-facing payments expert to sit at the intersection of Sales, Product, Engineering, and Customer Success. You will join technical sales conversations, design payment architectures, advise merchants and platforms, and drive gateway/processor integrations.

You will map complex environments, discuss tokenization, APIs, settlement, and reporting, and translate customer needs into practical product requirements while supporting onboarding

Qualifications

• 5+ years of payments, fintech, SaaS payments, merchant services, or related technical payments consulting experience.
• Experience in Solutions Engineering, Sales Engineering, or similar customer-facing technical roles.
• Strong understanding of gateways, merchant accounts, PayFac models, underwriting, settlement, and reporting.
• Ability to explain complex payments concepts to executives, product leaders, and engineers.
• Hands-on familiarity with APIs, webhooks, integration design, data flows, and troubleshooting.

Responsibilities

• Join sales and partner calls as the technical payments expert.
• Lead technical discovery with merchants, SaaS platforms, franchises, and enterprise customers.
• Map customer requirements across gateways, PayFac models, merchant accounts, and related workflows.
• Design payment solution recommendations and explain tradeoffs to diverse audiences.
• Assist in evaluating gateway integrations, processor options, and tokenization approaches.
• Collaborate with Sales to qualify opportunities and improve close rates.
• Partner with Product and Engineering on gateway capabilities and reporting tools.
• Translate customer needs into product requirements and implementation notes.
• Support onboarding and implementation for complex clients.
• Create diagrams, integration guides, and sales enablement materials.
• Stay current on payment gateway capabilities and industry best practices.
• Help train teams on payment technology.

Skills

Payments expertise

Solutions engineering

Sales engineering

Technical communication

APIs & integration

Job description

About Us

We help merchants, software platforms, multi‑unit retailers, and enterprise operators make better payments decisions. We act as an outsourced payments team: advising on processors, gateways, PayFac models, merchant accounts, integrations, pricing, onboarding, support, and long‑term payments strategy. We are also building new payments infrastructure, gateway capabilities, and integrations that require deep technical payments expertise.

The Role

We are hiring a deeply technical, customer‑facing payments expert to sit at the intersection of Sales, Product, Engineering, and Customer Success. This person will join technical sales conversations, design payment architectures, advise merchants and software platforms, support gateway and processor integrations, and bring real‑world payments expertise into our product roadmap.

You should be able to walk into a complex payments conversation and quickly understand the customer's environment: gateway, processor, PayFac or ISO model, merchant account setup, tokenization, APIs, settlement, reconciliation, reporting, POS/ecommerce workflows, risk, underwriting, boarding, and technical constraints. You will help customers understand what should be done, what options exist, what other companies are doing, and how we can help them make the best decision.

This is not a traditional salesperson role and not a pure software engineering role. It is a technical expert and technical sales role for someone who understands payments architecture, can explain it clearly, and can help both customers and internal teams make better technical decisions.

What You'll Do

• Join sales and partner calls as our technical payments expert.
• Lead technical discovery with merchants, SaaS platforms, franchises, and enterprise customers.
• Map customer requirements across gateways, processors, PayFac models, merchant accounts, ACH, card, POS, ecommerce, recurring billing, reporting, settlement and reconciliation.
• Design payment solution recommendations and explain tradeoffs to technical and non‑technical audiences.
• Help customers evaluate gateway integrations, processor options, PayFac vs. referral/ISO models, tokenization approaches, API requirements, hardware needs, and support workflows.
• Partner with Sales to qualify opportunities, scope solutions, answer technical objections, and improve close rates.
• Partner with Product and Engineering as we build gateway capabilities, processor integrations, reporting tools, onboarding workflows, and technical payments products.
• Translate customer needs and market feedback into product requirements, architecture recommendations, implementation notes, and reusable internal playbooks.
• Support technical onboarding and implementation planning for complex clients.
• Create diagrams, technical documentation, integration guides, solution briefs, and sales enablement materials.
• Stay current on payment gateway capabilities, processor platforms, PayFac trends, network rules, payment methods, fraud tools, tokenization, and industry best practices.
• Help train our sales, customer success, and product teams on payment technology.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years of experience in payments, fintech, SaaS payments, merchant services, payment gateways, processor integrations, PayFac, ISOs, or technical payments consulting.
• Experience in Solutions Engineering, Sales Engineering, Solutions Architecture, Technical Account Management, Implementation Engineering, or a similar customer‑facing technical role.
• Strong understanding of payment gateways, acquiring, merchant accounts, PayFac models, boarding, underwriting, settlement, reconciliation, reporting, tokenization, and payment APIs.
• Ability to explain technical payments concepts clearly to CEOs, CFOs, product leaders, developers, and operations teams.
• Hands‑on familiarity with APIs, webhooks, integration design, data flows, technical documentation, and troubleshooting.
• Experience supporting technical sales conversations and working directly with sales teams.
• Ability to produce clear diagrams, technical notes, customer‑facing recommendations, and internal enablement content.
• Strong product sense: you can turn customer problems into practical product requirements and roadmap input.
• Curiosity and humility: you can learn new processor, gateway, and software environments quickly.

Ideal Backgrounds

• Payment gateways: NMI, Authorize.net, Cybersource, Braintree, Spreedly, PayTrace, CardPointe, USAePay, Worldpay, Fiserv, GlobalPayments, Elavon, TSYS, FirstData, FreedomPay, Shift4, Adyen, Checkout.com, Stripe, PayPal/Braintree, Square/Block.
• SaaS or platform payments teams that embedded payments into vertical software.
• PayFac, ISO, ISV, or processor implementation teams.
• Technical account management, solutions engineering, sales engineering, or implementation engineering in payments.

Nice to Have

• Experience with PayFac or embedded payments models.
• Experience with NetSuite, Shopify Plus, WooCommerce, ERP, POS, franchise, or multi‑location merchant environments.
• Experience with gateway migrations, token migration, processor migrations, or large merchant onboarding.
• Familiarity with interchange, network fees, authorization optimization, chargebacks, fraud tools, and card‑present / card‑not‑present differences.
• Experience building or supporting developer documentation, API guides, or integration playbooks.
• Ability to code or prototype simple API flows is a plus, but this is not a heads‑down software engineering role.

Success Looks Like

• Become the technical lead on complex sales opportunities.
• Build a repeatable technical discovery framework for payments opportunities.
• Create reusable solution diagrams and integration recommendation templates.
• Help Product and Engineering prioritize gateway and integration work based on real customer needs.
• Improve the quality, speed, and confidence of technical sales calls.
• Become a trusted resource for customers, sales, product, engineering, and customer success.

Compensation

Competitive base salary plus performance‑based upside, depending on experience and seniority. For the right senior candidate, this role may be structured as Senior Solutions Engineer, Staff Solutions Engineer, Principal Solutions Architect, or Director of Payments Solutions.

Encore Talent Solutions is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We respect and seek to empower each individual and support the diverse cultures, perspectives, skills, and experiences withinourworkforce.