Software Architect (Payments)

Role Overview

This Abu Dhabi-based role sits at the heart of a payments platform that is expanding merchant acquiring and core payment processing capabilities. The position is responsible for shaping backend architecture for real-time transaction flows at production scale, with broad influence across squads and direct impact on the platform’s technical direction.

The company is a UAE consumer technology business focused on AI-enabled fintech, communications, and digital services. Its ecosystem includes a widely used fintech communication platform, financial services for individuals and SMEs, and a regulated lending engine that supports fast credit products across the network.

What You Will Do

You will act as the architectural link between the Chief Architect and engineering teams, turning product intent into scalable, production-ready payment systems. The role requires you to steer engineering decisions, uphold design standards across squads, and make the technical trade-offs needed to support reliable payment infrastructure.

Platform Architecture and Ownership

Lead the design and evolution of systems for merchant management, POS, and eCommerce acceptance. Own architecture across acquiring and related payment services, with a strong focus on throughput, latency, resilience, auth, clearing, settlement, and reconciliation.

Technical Leadership Across Squads

Provide architectural direction across multiple engineering teams at once. Maintain the end-to-end technical view, guide a small team of engineers, and take accountability for both design quality and delivery outcomes.

Product, Business, and Compliance Alignment

Partner closely with Product Owners to convert business intent and regulatory constraints into designs that are scalable, auditable, and fit for production. You will need to explain technical choices clearly to both engineering and non-technical stakeholders.

Integration and Hands-on Engineering

Define how card schemes, payment processors, and internal switching layers connect. Set standards for ISO 8583 messaging, RPC-based service communication, and safe failover across the acquiring service mesh. This is a hands-on leadership role, so you are expected to contribute to critical Java microservices, participate in code and architecture reviews, and help resolve complex production issues.

API and Event-Driven Design

Build REST/JSON APIs with strong idempotency, fault tolerance, and exactly-once processing in mind. Design event-driven transaction flows with RabbitMQ for lifecycle events, downstream processing, and asynchronous work. Use Redis patterns for distributed caching, idempotency keys, rate limiting, and real-time state management.

AI-Augmented Engineering

The team uses Claude Code as a standard assistant and expects it to be used heavily for architecture reviews, code and test generation, runbook drafting, log analysis, and automation of repetitive engineering work. You should actively identify manual tasks that can be automated and lead those efforts for the team.

Experience Required

The role calls for 12 to 15 years of backend or platform engineering experience, including substantial ownership of live card payment systems at a licensed fintech, payment processor, acquirer, or financial institution. The background should cover architecture, delivery, and production ownership rather than indirect exposure to payments.

Technical Background

You should bring expert-level Java and Spring Boot capability, including microservices architecture, application framework work, transactional integrity, service decomposition, and production API development. The role also expects strong command of ISO 8583 and payment messaging, including the full transaction journey from authorization through clearing and settlement, plus familiarity with switching frameworks such as jPOS or similar.

Prior experience integrating with payment gateways and processors is important, especially across REST and ISO-based integrations, hosted payment pages, tokenization, EMV 3DS 2.x authentication, and back-office reconciliation. Experience with MPGS, Cybersource, or comparable gateways is a strong advantage.

Hands-on experience with RabbitMQ or Kafka is also expected, along with knowledge of reliable transactional event flows, exchange and queue design, dead-letter handling, and acknowledgment strategies. Familiarity with Dubbo, gRPC, or a similar RPC framework is required for synchronous service communication and failure-aware design.

Leadership Expectations

You should be comfortable leading by example through architecture documents, design reviews, integration specifications, and decision records. The role also requires the ability to present trade-offs and architecture choices to Product, Risk, and Compliance stakeholders.

Core Technology Stack

Required technologies include Java, Spring Boot, ISO 8583, jPOS, payment gateway integrations such as MPGS or Cybersource, RabbitMQ or Kafka, Redis, gRPC, REST APIs, microservices, GitLab or GitHub, and MySQL, MongoDB, or Elasticsearch. Strong familiarity with Azure or AWS, EMV 3DS 2.x, EMV, tokenization, Visa and Mastercard scheme integration, CI/CD, and TOGAF is a plus.