Senior Payments Architect

Perficient; United States; On-site; USD 92,118 - 202,730; Full time

Job summary

Perficient is seeking a Senior Payments Architect in the United States to define and own the reference architecture for the payments platform, ensuring robust data flows, secure handling of transactions, and seamless integration with external processors and banks. You will mentor engineers and drive architecture reviews.

You will shape resilience, observability, and compliance across complex payment workflows, including onboarding, settlement, and reconciliation, while influencing cross‑team

Qualifications

• Experience architecting production payment systems.
• Deep understanding of payments lifecycle and reconciliation.
• Ability to lead architecture reviews and write clear design docs.

Responsibilities

• Own the reference architecture for the payments platform: service boundaries, data flows, event models, and contracts between internal domains.
• Design systems where correctness is paramount — idempotency, exactly‑once semantics, consistent ledgering, and graceful handling of partial failures.
• Lead integrations with payment service providers, acquirers, card schemes, and banking partners; translate rules into robust internal designs.
• Define the money‑movement data model and source‑of‑truth ledger for auditable transactions.
• Set standards for resilience and operability: retries, circuit breakers, reconciliation loops, observability.
• Embed security and compliance into the architecture — PCI DSS scope minimization, tokenization, encryption, and strong authentication flows.
• Review designs and code for high‑risk paths; mentor engineers on correct systems.
• Evaluate build‑vs‑buy decisions across processors and ledger platforms; make clear recommendations.
• Translate commercial and regulatory requirements into technical designs and communicate trade‑offs clearly.

Skills

Payments architecture

Distributed systems

AI tools

Tools

Spreedly

Gr4vy

Primer

BR-DGE

Job description

Job Description

We currently have a career opportunity for a Senior Payments Architect to join our team located in the United States. As a Senior Payments Architect, you will provide best-fit architectural solutions for one or more projects, assist in defining scope and sizing of work, and anchor Proof of Concept developments. You will design and develop complex features for clients’ business needs and provide solution architecture for business problems, platform integration with third‑party services, and platform integration with third‑party services.

The Senior Payments Architect will provide technology direction, ensure project implementation compliance, and utilize technology research to innovate, integrate, and manage technology solutions. You will collaborate with some of the best talent in the industry to create and implement innovative high‑quality solutions, participate in Sales and various pursuits focused on our clients’ business needs. This role is part of the Business Unit Leadership team and may mentor Junior Architects and/or development team members.

Responsibilities

• Own the reference architecture for the payments platform: service boundaries, data flows, event models, and the contracts between internal domains (authorization, ledger, settlement, disputes, reconciliation, reporting).
• Design systems where correctness is paramount — idempotency, exactly‑once semantics where they matter, consistent ledgering, and graceful handling of partial failures, timeouts, and network splits with external processors.
• Lead integrations with payment service providers, acquirers, card schemes, and banking partners, translating scheme rules and processor specs into robust internal designs.
• Define the money‑movement data model and the source‑of‑truth ledger, ensuring every transaction is traceable, auditable, and reconcilable.
• Set standards for resilience and operability: retries, circuit breakers, reconciliation loops, and the observability needed to detect and diagnose stuck or mismatched funds quickly.
• Embed security and compliance into the architecture — PCI DSS scope minimization, tokenization, encryption of sensitive data, and strong authentication flows (e.g., 3‑D Secure / SCA where applicable).
• Review designs and code for the highest‑risk paths, and mentor engineers on building payment systems that are correct under failure, not just under happy‑path conditions.
• Evaluate build‑vs‑buy decisions across processors, orchestration layers, fraud tooling, and ledger platforms, and make clear, well‑reasoned recommendations.
• Work with product and finance to translate commercial and regulatory requirements into technical designs, and communicate trade‑offs clearly to both technical and non‑technical stakeholders.

Qualifications

• Substantial experience architecting or leading the design of production payment systems, ideally at meaningful transaction volume.
• Deep understanding of the payments lifecycle: authorization, capture, settlement, refunds, chargebacks/disputes, and reconciliation.
• Strong grasp of distributed systems fundamentals — consistency models, idempotency, concurrency, eventual consistency, and designing for partial failure.
• Practical experience integrating with at least one category of external payment infrastructure: card processors/acquirers, PSPs/gateways, or bank rails.
• Hands‑on experience with payment orchestration platforms — routing and failover across multiple processors, smart/least‑cost routing, retry and cascading logic, and vaulting/tokenization — whether built in‑house or using a commercial layer (e.g., Spreedly, Gr4vy, Primer, BR‑DGE).
• Solid understanding of double‑entry ledgering and why financial systems favor immutable, auditable records over mutable balances.
• Working knowledge of payments security and compliance: PCI DSS, tokenization, encryption, and secure handling of cardholder or account data.
• Demonstrated ability to leverage AI tools to enhance productivity, streamline workflows, and support data‑informed task execution.
• Familiarity with AI‑enhanced platforms is a plus.
• A solid understanding of AI capabilities and limitations including ethical considerations is expected.
• Ability to lead through influence — writing clear design docs, running architecture reviews, and aligning multiple teams on a shared direction.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with payment messaging standards such as ISO 8583 (card) and ISO 20022 (bank/real‑time rails).
• Experience with real‑time payment rails (e.g., FedNow, RTP, SEPA Instant, Faster Payments, UPI) or ACH/SEPA batch schemes.
• Exposure to 3‑D Secure 2.x, Strong Customer Authentication (PSD2/SCA), and network tokenization.
• Experience with fraud and risk systems, and how they interact with authorization decisioning.
• Background in a regulated environment (banking, EMI, money transmitter) and familiarity with the associated audit and reporting obligations.
• Multi‑currency, FX, or cross‑border settlement experience.
• Experience with event‑driven architectures, and with the cloud and data platforms we use (e.g., AWS/GCP/Azure, Kafka, your primary languages).

Team Overview

Our Financial Services team empowers leading financial institutions to accelerate digital transformation and achieve sustainable growth. We bring together deep industry expertise and innovative technologies, including AI, to help clients reimagine their operations, enhance customer experiences, and stay ahead in a rapidly evolving market. From intelligent data platforms and customer analytics to AI‑driven risk management and compliance solutions, we help firms operate more efficiently, build loyalty, and drive measurable impact.

Additional Information

The salary range for this position takes into consideration a variety of factors, including but not limited to skill sets, level of experience, applicable office location, training, licensure and certifications, and other business and organizational needs. The new hire salary range displays the minimum and maximum salary targets for this position across all U.S. locations, and the range has not been adjusted for any specific state differentials. It is not typical for a candidate to be hired at or near the top of the range for their role, and compensation decisions are dependent on the unique facts and circumstances regarding each candidate. A reasonable estimate of the current salary range for this position is $92,118 to $202,730. Please note that the salary range posted reflects the base salary only and does not include benefits or any potential variable compensation programs. Information regarding the benefits available for this position are in our benefits overview.