Payforge · 1 month ago
Design Lead
United States
Full-time
Remote
Lead/StaffPayforge is a specialist professional-services company focused exclusively on payments and fintech. They are seeking a Design Lead to bridge the gap between high-level enterprise architecture and day-to-day implementation, owning the detailed technical specification and design of core software components for a scalable card issuing platform.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)PaymentsSoftware
Responsibilities
Take ownership of specific high-complexity domains (e.g., Transaction Authorization Engine, Ledger Management, PIN Processing) and produce detailed Technical Design Documents (TDDs) and RFCs
Define clear API contracts, data models, and inter-service communication patterns (synchronous vs. asynchronous) to ensure decoupling and scalability
Bridge the gap between the Software Architect’s vision and the squad’s implementation, making high-level architectural decisions actionable and concrete
Act as the technical authority for 2–3 squads, reviewing their code and designs to ensure alignment with the broader architectural vision
Enforce SOLID principles and Clean Architecture constraints across the codebase
Lead complex problem-solving sessions regarding concurrency, locking strategies, and distributed transaction consistency (Sagas, Idempotency)
Design for high-volume transaction processing (TPS), focusing strictly on latency reduction, memory management (GC tuning), and database query optimization
Architect system resilience features, including circuit breakers, bulkheads, and retry policies for external integrations (e.g., Payment Schemes, HSMs)
Embed security into the design phase ("Secure by Design"), defining how sensitive data (PAN, PIN blocks) is tokenized, encrypted, and stored in compliance with PCI DSS
Design secure patterns for secret management and service-to-service authentication (mTLS) within Kubernetes
Qualification
Required
Core Logic: Expert-level mastery of Java 21 and Spring Boot 3, with a specific focus on multi-threading, concurrency, and reactive programming patterns
Data Modeling: Deep experience designing complex database schemas for PostgreSQL (relational integrity) and implementing caching strategies using Redis
Distributed Systems: Proven ability to design event-driven architectures using Kafka (topic design, partition strategies, ordering guarantees)
Infrastructure: Strong grasp of how application design impacts infrastructure costs and limits within AWS (EKS, MSK, RDS)
You favor simple, maintainable designs over clever, complex code
You understand the trade-offs between Consistency and Availability (CAP theorem) and can articulate why you chose a specific path for a specific component
You can document a complex flow using UML, Sequence Diagrams, or C4 models clearly enough that a mid-level engineer can implement it without ambiguity
Precision: You do not leave edge cases to chance; you design for failure scenarios (network blips, timeouts, downstream outages)
Mentorship over Management: Unlike a Team Lead, your primary focus is not sprint velocity or HR, but raising the technical bar of the engineers around you through code reviews and design workshops
Translation Skills: The ability to explain to a Product Manager why a specific feature requires a schema change and the effort involved, without getting lost in jargon
Ownership: You treat the architecture documents as living products, keeping them updated as the software evolves
Preferred
Payments Internals: Deep understanding of the lifecycle of a payment (Auth, Clearing, Settlement) and the ISO 8583 standard or JSON-based variants
Security protocols: Experience designing integrations with HSMs (Hardware Security Modules), Thales/Luna, or cloud-based KMS/CloudHSM
Fintech Constraints: Experience designing systems that must never lose data (financial ledgers) and require exact-once processing
Company
Payforge
Payforge builds AI-driven payment systems and provides engineering services for payments companies, fintechs, and banks.
Founded in 2025
51-200 employees
Funding
Current Stage
Growth StageCompany data provided by crunchbase