Senior Engineering Lead - Applied AI for Payments

Spire - Pay with Spire, Inc.; Dallas (TX); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Equity (stock options)

Health, dental, and vision insurance

Discretionary PTO

401(k)

Learning and development support

Job summary

Pay With Spire is seeking an Engineering & Applied AI Lead to serve as the senior technical authority, coding hands-on while guiding a talented team and shaping AI in our core platform. You will own architecture for payments, microservices, APIs, and SDKs, and drive AI-enabled development across the engineering org.

You will mentor engineers, lead architecture reviews, and steer AI tool adoption to accelerate shipping while ensuring secure, scalable solutions in payments.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in software engineering, including 2+ in a tech lead, senior architect, or applied AI role.
• Hands-on experience with Azure DevOps, CI/CD, and cloud-native design on Azure.
• A track record of rolling out AI dev tools (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or similar) in a production team.
• Deep knowledge of microservices, REST APIs, event-driven systems, and OAuth2.
• SQL and NoSQL design and performance tuning at scale.
• Strong TDD and automated testing discipline.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering.
• Mobile SDK experience (Kotlin and/or Swift) strongly preferred.
• You've shipped production ML in payments or fintech (risk scoring, anomaly detection, NLP, or similar).
• You've worked with ACH, settlement, tokenization, or card network APIs.
• You know PCI DSS from a developer's perspective.

Responsibilities

• Lead our Software Engineers day to day: assign work, review code, unblock, and own delivery quality.
• Own the architecture of our core platform, including payment processing, microservices, APIs, mobile SDKs, and ACH and card network integrations.
• Champion AI-assisted development across engineering, choosing and rolling out the tools and workflows that raise velocity and code quality.
• Find and build applied AI/ML opportunities in our product: risk scoring, transaction intelligence, consumer behavior modeling, and operations automation.
• Set the bar on engineering practice: TDD/BDD, automated testing, CI/CD on Azure DevOps, and secure OAuth2 integrations.
• Design SQL and NoSQL data models built for scale.
• Partner with Product and Engineering leadership on sprint planning, backlog refinement, and architecture reviews.
• Lead technical due diligence on new integrations and vendor APIs.
• Mentor engineers and help them grow.

Skills

AI/ML in payments

Microservices

REST APIs

OAuth2

TDD/Automated testing

Event-driven architecture

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering

Tools

Azure DevOps

CI/CD

GitHub Copilot

Cursor

Job description

Pay With Spire is seeking an Engineering & Applied AI Lead to serve as the senior technical authority, coding hands-on while guiding a talented team and shaping AI in our core platform. You will own architecture for payments, microservices, APIs, and SDKs, and drive AI-enabled development across the engineering org.

You will mentor engineers, lead architecture reviews, and steer AI tool adoption to accelerate shipping while ensuring secure, scalable solutions in payments.