Principal Architect

We're looking for a hands-on principal engineer to own technology for an early-stage fiat + crypto fintech wallet. You will own architecture, engineering, security, infrastructure, and technical strategy while remaining close to the code.

Responsibilities:

• Architecture: Own the end-to-end architecture for fiat/crypto wallets, payments, bank and P2P transfers, merchant payments, multi-currency systems, on/off ramps, and stablecoins.
• Core Financial Systems: Architect the double-entry ledger and transaction engine, ensuring idempotency, atomicity, reconciliation, accurate balances, auditability, and transaction traceability.
• Hands-on Engineering: Review/write code, design APIs and database schemas, architect distributed systems, and troubleshoot production issues.
• Security: Own authentication, authorization, encryption, API security, fraud controls, key management, custody, transaction signing, and HSM/MPC where applicable.
• Cloud and Reliability: Own production infrastructure across AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, CI/CD, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Kafka, including observability, high availability, and disaster recovery.
• Integrations: Architect integrations with banks, payment gateways/processors, card issuers, KYC/KYB/AML providers, crypto custody, blockchain/RPC, and fraud and FX providers
• Compliance: Ensure technology supports KYC/KYB, AML, sanctions screening, transaction monitoring, Travel Rule, audit trails, data privacy, and regulatory reporting
• Engineering Leadership: Define technical strategy and engineering standards and build-vs-buy decisions; hire and mentor the engineering team and partner closely with Product, Risk, Compliance, and Operations.

Requirements:

• 10+ years in software engineering with senior technical leadership experience.
• Deep backend and distributed systems expertise.
• Built/scaled fintech, payments, banking, wallets, or financial transaction systems
• Strong experience with ledger/transaction architecture
• Strong cloud, security, and production architecture fundamentals.
• Experience hiring and leading engineering teams.
• Still technically hands-on, able to go deep into architecture and code.