Senior Java Engineering Lead (Payments Technology) — Vice President

Description

The company's Core Payment Systems team is hiring a Senior Engineering Lead, Payments Technology at Vice President level to design, build and grow the global payment processing platforms of a large international financial institution.

You will write code yourself and also set technical direction for a cross-functional team building highly resilient, high-throughput microservices that handle transactions at global scale.

The work involves modern engineering methods, AI-assisted development and cloud-native architecture on mission-critical payment infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Own critical payment applications from design through production release and ongoing support, leading delivery as the Senior Engineering Lead.
• Build fast, low-latency microservices in Java 8+ with Spring Boot, following cloud-native principles and meeting strict targets for performance, scale and security.
• Drive adoption of Domain-Driven Design, event-driven architecture and Docker and Kubernetes containers to modernise legacy payment platforms.
• Coach and lead the engineering team, setting technical standards through code reviews that enforce Clean Code and SOLID principles across payment services.
• Bring AI developer tools such as GitHub Copilot and LLM-based code generation into the development lifecycle to speed up delivery, automate test generation and support static analysis.
• Design payment systems for 99.99%+ availability using active-active failover, multi-region redundancy, zero-downtime deployments, and resilience patterns such as Circuit Breakers, Bulkheads and Saga transaction management.
• Set and maintain SLAs, SLOs and SLIs for all critical payment services, run Chaos Engineering experiments to find weak points early, and work with infrastructure teams on Kubernetes auto-scaling and service mesh traffic management.
• Work with product managers, business analysts and operations staff to turn complex payment requirements into scalable, maintainable solutions with thorough documentation.

Requirements

• At least 6 years of software development experience on complex, enterprise-scale backend systems, including at least 3 years leading technical work hands-on.
• Expert-level Java and Spring Boot, with a proven record of building and running production microservices at scale.
• Solid knowledge of microservice architecture, Domain-Driven Design and event-driven patterns, with hands-on use of Kafka or RabbitMQ.
• Practical experience with Docker, Kubernetes and cloud platforms, plus a firm grasp of CI/CD pipelines, automated testing and modern DevOps practice.
• A demonstrated history of applying Clean Code and SOLID principles through code reviews, coaching and direct work on production code.
• Hands-on experience with relational databases such as Oracle and NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, and the judgement to pick the right one for each use case.
• Strong communication skills, with experience working effectively with both technical teams and non-technical stakeholders in mission-critical settings.
• Beneficial: hands-on experience rolling out AI developer tools such as GitHub Copilot or Amazon CodeWhisperer across an enterprise engineering team, including AI-assisted code review, test generation, and AIOps platforms such as Dynatrace AI or Splunk ITSI to cut MTTR and improve reliability.
• Beneficial: experience putting AI and ML into production payment or financial services systems for anomaly detection, predictive alerting and fraud signal enrichment, with an understanding of responsible AI governance and regulatory compliance.
• Beneficial: proven experience designing distributed payment or financial transaction systems for 99.99%+ availability, including active-active multi-region failover, blue-green or canary deployments, Circuit Breakers using Resilience4j or Hystrix, and Saga orchestration.
• Beneficial: experience leading Site Reliability Engineering, owning SLAs, SLOs and SLIs, running Chaos Engineering with tools such as Chaos Monkey or Gremlin, and building observability stacks with distributed tracing and real-time alerting.
• Beneficial: familiarity with payment standards and protocols such as SWIFT, ISO 20022 or clearing systems, gained in a regulated financial services environment.

Conditions

Full-time role based in Tampa, Florida, United States, following a hybrid model with 3 days in the office and 2 days remote.

Base salary range for this location is $113,840.00 to $170,760.00.

Eligible employees may also receive discretionary and formulaic incentive and retention awards.

Benefits include medical, dental and vision coverage, a 401(k), life, accident and disability insurance, wellness programs, and paid vacation, sick leave and holidays; offerings vary by jurisdiction, job level and hire date.

The posting closes on Oct 22, 2026.

Hiring decisions are made and checked by people, not automated systems, and AI is used only to match candidates' skills to roles.

Benefits

• Work on payment technology that millions of people and institutions depend on, alongside skilled engineers and technology leaders on hard problems at real scale.
• Clear ownership of technical direction on one of the company's most strategically important engineering platforms.
• Access to advanced engineering practices, including AI-assisted development tools and cloud-native platform capabilities at global scale.
• Ongoing learning, including technical training, professional certifications and exposure to enterprise-scale architecture challenges.
• Competitive pay and financial wellbeing benefits suited to a Vice President role at a major global financial institution.
• Wellbeing support and work-life balance programmes to help you perform well over the long term.
• The chance to lead and grow a high-performing engineering team and to shape its technical culture and its engineers' careers.