Engineering lead, payin

Payabli is the Intelligent Fintech Operating System for software platforms. If you are a software company, you are a fintech company, and Payabli is your operating system. Built by payments industry and SaaS veterans and powered by its own models, Payabli gives platforms everything they need to embed, manage, and monetize financial services through a single developer-friendly API spanning Pay In, Pay Out, and Pay Ops. Intelligence is not a layer on top, it is the foundation, expressed through Amigo™, Payabli's native AI Agent Suite, and a growing set of capabilities that make payment operations smarter and more autonomous.

Payabli gives software companies PayFac capabilities without the heavy lift, administrative burden, or cost of becoming a payment facilitator themselves. With PayFac-as-a-Service, embedded payment acceptance and issuance, and intelligent payment operations, platforms turn payments into a meaningful revenue stream while staying focused on their core product.

Payabli is backed by world-class fintech investors including QED Investors, Fika Ventures, TTV Capital, and Bling Capital, and was recently named to the Forbes Fintech 50.

For more information, visit payabli.com.

About the Role

We're hiring an Engineering Lead, PayIn - the team that owns how money comes into Payabli. PayIn powers everything our partners use to accept payments from their customers: payment APIs, recurring billing and autopay, invoices and payment links, hosted pages and the virtual terminal, embedded checkout and digital wallets, surcharging, card-present devices, and check rails like lockbox and remote deposit. It also owns what happens after the payment - batching, funding, transfers, and reconciliation - across multiple card processors, ACH, and check processing partners.

PayIn is absolutely critical to the business. Every partner builds on it, every merchant gets paid through it, and every new market we enter runs through it. Success in this role means PayIn scales with the business - more volume, more partners, more payment methods - with reliability and quality partners take for granted and a team that delivers at pace. PayIn is also where Payabli's intelligence meets the payment: smarter risk decisions at checkout, proactive detection of failures and duplicate payments, and agents that handle disputes and exceptions so people can focus on the judgment calls - built hand in hand with our AI and Risk Engineering teams.

What You'll Do

• Build a high-performing team. Hire, develop, and retain engineers who own their systems end to end. Set clear expectations, give direct feedback, and grow a distributed team that delivers without missing a beat.
• Deliver at pace, predictably. Partner with PayIn Product to turn an ambitious roadmap into commitments the business can plan around. Prioritize ruthlessly, sequence the work, and make the tradeoffs explicit.
• Scale payment acceptance. Our payment APIs, recurring billing, invoices and payment links, hosted pages, virtual terminal, embedded components, and digital wallets stay fast, available, and correct as volume and partner count grow.
• Make funding something partners never have to think about. Batching, funding, transfers, same-day ACH, and reconciliation run on time, every time, with clear visibility for partners and for us.
• Keep every integration production-grade. Card processor, ACH, and check processing integrations are dependable, and sandbox mirrors production so partners can test the full payment lifecycle with confidence.
• Ship fast and safe. Build an engineering culture where speed and safety reinforce each other. Releasing to systems that move money should be a non-event - frequent, low-risk - so the team gets faster as the platform grows, not slower.
• Run on clear signals. Define SLOs for payment success, latency, and funding timeliness, and build the observability that lets the team see issues first and resolve them fast.
• Scale knowledge, not just systems. Architecture docs, runbooks, and on-call practices that make the team resilient and get new engineers productive quickly.
• Build intelligence into the payment flow. Partner with our AI and Risk Engineering teams to put real-time risk scoring, anomaly detection, and agentic workflows - like dispute handling and exception management - into production. Lead a team that uses AI to build faster and better every day.

What We're Looking For

These are the core requirements for the role. We don't expect every candidate to check all of them, but this is a senior bar and we're looking for genuine depth across most.

• 10+ years building and operating production backend systems, including 3+ years leading engineering teams responsible for business-critical services.
• Payments experience is required. You've built or led systems in payment acceptance, gateways, acquiring, or funding - card, ACH, or both - and you know what happens to a payment after authorization.
• You've scaled a critical team and its systems. You've led through significant growth in volume, partners, and complexity, and can show how reliability, quality, and delivery improved together.
• You set expectations and hold the line. You define what good looks like, build accountability, and make hard people decisions - hiring, performance, team structure - with care and conviction.
• You build visibility. You know what's happening across your team and systems before anyone has to ask, through the metrics, SLOs, incident practices, and operating rhythms you put in place.
• You make hard technical calls. You weigh speed against scale and technical debt, stay close enough to the code to evaluate a design, and earn the respect of senior engineers.
• Deep hands-on backend engineering experience in any modern language. We care that you understand distributed systems, relational databases, background processing, and cloud services from first principles, not which syntax you learned them in.
• Experience designing and evolving RESTful and event-driven APIs that external developers depend on - versioning, backward compatibility, idempotency, and webhooks.
• Clear communicator who can influence. You can explain a tradeoff to a partner, a PM, or a salesperson, and you push back - including on us - when the evidence says we're wrong.

Nice to Haves

• Experience integrating directly with card processors and acquirers, including settlement and funding files.
• Card-present experience - semi-integrated terminals, Tap to Pay/SoftPOS, or device management at scale.
• Check processing experience - lockbox, X9, or remote deposit capture.
• Deep familiarity with ACH and NACHA rules, including same-day ACH, returns, and SEC codes.
• Experience with surcharging, convenience fees, split funding, or recurring billing platforms.
• Familiarity with PCI DSS and tokenization.
• Experience leading distributed teams across time zones.
• Experience at a vertical SaaS or embedded payments platform, where partners build their own product on your APIs.

We think you'll love being part of our team because

At Payabli, you'll have a front row seat into building a high-growth venture backed fintech company. As a senior leader in Operations, you'll shape how the organization scales and be the driving force behind our AI-first operations strategy — directly influencing how we build, automate, and optimize for the future. You'll stretch yourself every day, learn a ton, grow alongside the company, and have a lot of fun building Payabli with us. We're a values driven company that cares deeply about our team, partners, and customers. Our north star values are:

• 🤝 Team Love = Customer Love — You understand that when you build great products for your internal partners, they deliver exceptional experiences to merchants. You obsess over the platform partners and businesses that depend on every payout landing on time.
• 🔥 Run to the Fire — When ACH returns spike or a card program hits a snag, you're the first one in the war room. You don't shy away from hard problems—you chase them. You volunteer for the complex, messy challenges others avoid.
• 🔍 Little Things Count — You sweat the details because you know a single decimal error in a payout can damage a business. You double-check edge cases, validate every assumption, and understand that excellence lives in the details.
• 💎 Truth Seekers — You give direct feedback, receive it with grace, and never let ego get in the way of finding the right answer. You document what you don't know, admit mistakes quickly, and hold yourself accountable in the open.
• 🚀 Relentlessly Curious — You're constantly asking "what if?" and "why not?" You study how competitors solve problems, explore adjacent industries for inspiration, and never stop learning about the payments ecosystem.

We build technology that gets noticed and a workplace where people want to grow their careers. Our work has been recognized by some of the industry’s most respected organizations, including being named No. 43 on the 2026 Inc. 5000, marking our third consecutive year on the list. Payabli was also named to the 2026 Forbes Fintech 50, recognizing the most innovative private companies in financial technology, Inc.’s 2025 Best Workplaces, and Built In’s 2026 Best Places to Work in Miami.

What we can offer you

• Competitive salary
• Stock options with the potential to unlock more equity as we grow
• Flexible PTO and paid parental leave
• Medical, dental, & vision insurance
• 401K, HSA, pre-tax savings programs

Payabli is an equal opportunity employer and values a diverse, inclusive workplace.

Principals only. No external agency submissions. Candidates must apply directly; We will not accept submissions from third-party recruiters or staffing agencies.