Remote Senior Software Architect for Payments Platforms

PayJunction; Santa Barbara (CA); Hybrid; USD 240,000 - 275,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental & vision insurance 100%

401k with 6% match

FSA / Dependent Care FSA

Disability coverage 100% by company

8 paid company holidays

2 paid floating holidays

Paid volunteer day

Paid time off

Home office equipment stipend

Annual learning stipend

Quarterly team budgeting for events

Remote, in-office or hybrid options

Job summary

PayJunction is seeking a Software Architect to design and build the enterprise features and payment integrations our partners rely on to move billions of dollars a year, taking open-ended problems from a blank page to production while still writing Java yourself.

The role combines hands-on coding in Java with architecture leadership, working from our Santa Barbara office or remotely, with a strong emphasis on reliability, PCI compliance, and partner-focused payments platforms.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software engineering, with hands-on ownership of production systems.
• 5+ years of architecture experience as an Architect, Staff, or Principal Engineer, owning designs that span multiple services or teams.
• 5+ years of Java, including web frameworks and the JVM ecosystem, with production Java written in the last 12 months.
• 5+ years mentoring senior and mid-level engineers through code review, design review, and pairing; formal people management not required.
• Production experience with AWS, Linux (Ubuntu/Debian), relational databases (MySQL preferred), CI/CD (Jenkins or comparable), infrastructure as code (Puppet or similar), and observability tooling (Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus, or comparable).
• Designed and operated a high-availability transactional system where downtime or data loss had direct financial or customer impact.
• Currently uses AI coding assistants or agents (Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor, or comparable) in day-to-day production work.
• BS in Computer Science or equivalent applied experience.
• Preferred: payments or fintech experience such as card processing, gateways, or acquiring; PCI DSS-regulated environment.

Responsibilities

• Lead open-ended initiatives from a blank page to production with Product and Engineering leadership, breaking the problem down, directing other engineers, and making the calls that keep the team moving.
• Personally design the highest-risk systems end to end, writing design docs clear enough to build from, with requirements, trade-offs, and failure modes stated up front.
• Stay hands-on: write production Java every sprint, review pull requests promptly, and hold work to a test strategy built for high-risk payment paths.
• Mentor senior engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and pairing, growing the team's design capability so not every decision runs through you.
• Architect enterprise capabilities such as SSO, role-based access, audit trails, and multi-merchant hierarchy, plus versioned APIs partners can build on without breaking changes.
• Keep the core platform processor-agnostic and our processor integrations performing optimally, from message mapping through reversals and settlement reconciliation.
• Design for reliability and PCI from the start: define SLOs and monitoring, remove single points of failure, lead root-cause analysis, and shrink PCI scope by design.
• Raise the team's delivery velocity with AI-assisted development, setting review and security guardrails for AI-generated code.

Skills

10+ years software engineering

Architecture leadership

5+ years Java

Mentoring engineers

AI coding assistants

Education

BS in Computer Science or equivalent

Tools

AWS

Linux

MySQL

CI/CD (Jenkins)

Infrastructure as Code (Puppet)

Observability tools (Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus)

Job description

PayJunction is seeking a Software Architect to design and build the enterprise features and payment integrations our partners rely on to move billions of dollars a year, taking open-ended problems from a blank page to production while still writing Java yourself.

The role combines hands-on coding in Java with architecture leadership, working from our Santa Barbara office or remotely, with a strong emphasis on reliability, PCI compliance, and partner-focused payments platforms.