Principal Money Systems Architect

Plugmotors; Los Angeles (CA); Hybrid; USD 222,000 - 259,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, Vision, and Dental insurance

401(k) plan

30 days work from anywhere per year

Daily lunch stipend

Equity (role-based)

Unlimited PTO

Fully stocked kitchen

Dog-friendly office

Growth and development opportunities

Job summary

Plug is seeking a Principal Software Engineer, Fintech, to own the architecture of money-facing systems, including ledger, payments, and settlements. You will collaborate with Product, Risk, Finance, and Compliance to translate requirements into scalable designs and ensure regulatory alignment.

This in-person role is based in Sawtelle/LA or San Francisco, CA, with leadership responsibility over critical financial infrastructure and opportunities to influence engineering standards across the

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software engineering with focus on payments solutions.
• Direct experience designing payments, ledger, lending, or money movement infrastructure.
• Ability to design within regulatory and stakeholder constraints while maintaining efficiency and cleanliness.
• Experience designing systems under banking-partner constraints and regulator sign-off.
• Deep expertise in transaction integrity, data consistency, idempotency, auditability, and fault tolerance at scale.
• Track record of end-to-end architecture ownership from design to long-term maintainability.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture for Plug's money-facing systems: ledger, payment disbursement, settlement, reconciliation, and lien/title payoff processing.
• Design a ledger that is deterministic, auditable, and provides a single source of truth for every dollar moved on the platform.
• Architect systems that integrate with banking partners, payment processors, and lien/title servicers under regulatory requirements.
• Document core technical tradeoffs for financial systems: consistency vs. availability, idempotency, fault tolerance, and recovery.
• Partner with Product, Risk, Finance, and Compliance to translate business and regulatory requirements into system design.
• Set technical standards and review architecture for any money-related systems before shipping.
• Mentor engineers around money systems to raise the technical bar without formal people management.
• Evaluate build vs. integrate decisions with external payments/banking providers.

Skills

Payments experience

Ledger design

Distributed systems

Regulatory compliance

Architecture decisions

Cross-functional collaboration

Mentoring (non-management)

Banking/processor integration

Ambiguity tolerance

Job description

Plug is seeking a Principal Software Engineer, Fintech, to own the architecture of money-facing systems, including ledger, payments, and settlements. You will collaborate with Product, Risk, Finance, and Compliance to translate requirements into scalable designs and ensure regulatory alignment.

This in-person role is based in Sawtelle/LA or San Francisco, CA, with leadership responsibility over critical financial infrastructure and opportunities to influence engineering standards across the