--- title: 'Principal Payments Engineer at Payabli' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/principal-payments-engineer-payabli-remote-z9yk8ewhh8cv' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-09-08' --- # Principal Payments Engineer at Payabli - **Company:** Payabli - **Location:** Remote - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** remote - **Posted:** 2026-09-04 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/payabli/15897dfa-fefa-4c7c-897a-8e4430ea46b3 ## Job description Payabli is a next-generation Payments Infrastructure and Monetization Platform purpose-built for vertical software companies. Through a single, developer-friendly API with low-code embedded payment components, Payabli enables platforms to seamlessly embed, monetize, and operationalize payments—making payments a core part of their platform and business model. By unifying payment acceptance, payment issuance, and advanced payment operations tooling, Payabli empowers software companies to manage and move money through a single infrastructure stack that delivers total control over the payments experience. Built to scale with PCI DSS 4.0 and SOC 2-compliant security, Payabli’s infrastructure delivers enterprise-grade reliability and trust while leveraging AI-driven intelligence to enhance visibility, streamline operations, and drive revenue growth. Backed by leading fintech investors including QED Investors, Fika Ventures, TTV Capital, and Bling Capital, Payabli is setting the standard for embedded payments infrastructure powering the next generation of vertical SaaS. This Principal Payments Engineer is the founding hire for Payments Core - a dedicated team we're standing up to centralize the parts of the platform that cannot fail: the movement of money itself, from rails to batching/funding to reconciliation to ledgering, across hundreds of partners and hundreds of thousands of paypoints. This work happens today, distributed across the org and coupled to lower-blast-radius concerns. This role owns pulling it into one place, drawing a hard line around it, and holding it to the reliability and correctness standards money movement demands at scale. You'll be the most senior IC on the team and report to the CTO on an interim basis while we build out the org around you. The test for what belongs in this org is simple: does it stop the movement of funds? If yes, it's core, and it's yours to own. We're looking for a bar-raiser who's operated payments infrastructure at $10s to $100s of billions in GMV and knows what that scale actually breaks - someone who looks around corners, finds trouble before it finds us, and isn't afraid to challenge orthodoxy, including ours, when the evidence says we're wrong. This role rewards an entrepreneurial mindset: comfort with ambiguity, making calls with incomplete information, and taking ownership of outcomes rather than waiting to be told what to build. The choices you make early will be load-bearing for years, and you'll set the technical foundation both for the payments engineers we hire after you and for the engineers already working in these areas today. ## What You'll Do - Guarantee correctness at scale. Define how the platform guarantees a payment executes exactly once, even under partial failure, retries, and cross-service races - and make that guarantee a first-class, testable property of the system, not a convention people are trusted to follow. - Set the API contract. Design the internal/external API surface partners and internal teams both build against - versioning, backward compatibility, webhook delivery guarantees - so there's no split between what we use internally and what partners get. - Direct money-movement architecture. Set the direction for multi-rail orchestration (ACH, wire, RTP/FedNow, card networks) across multiple financial institutions, including direct connections to our sponsor banks and networks like Visa Direct, and how the platform routes, retries, and fails over rails and FIs. - Own batching, funding, and reconciliation. These are the functions where a broken promise gets noticed fastest - partners feel it directly when funding is late or reconciliation doesn't match. Bring the same rigor here as anywhere else in the platform: accurate matching against external settlement data, fast exception handling, and no surprises. - Build reliability and observability from day one. Establish the architecture-review and RFC standards, plus the monitoring and alerting, that let us catch trouble before it takes down live payment processing - not after. - Set the bar for the team. Establish the practices, review standards, and technical hiring criteria the payments engineers who join after you will be held to. You're setting the bar, not just clearing it. ## 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. - 12+ years building production payments or financial systems, with direct experience operating at $10s to $100s of billions in GMV and a track record of owning architecture and seeing big decisions through to production. - Direct experience designing or operating a double-entry ledger in production - you can speak fluently to derived balances, hot-account partitioning, and schema evolution under load. - Direct experience building idempotent, exactly-once payment flows in real-time, high-throughput systems, and can describe concretely how you held correctness under load - when a retry landed on a different instance than the original request, or when a database write failed after a payment had already been authorized. - Experience designing distributed data architecture and petabyte-scale storage systems, and building high-throughput services that hold sub-50ms latency under real production load. - Deep experience with settlement and reconciliation against real external data - bank files, card network settlement, ACH returns - treating mismatch detection as core system design, not an afterthought. - Experience with multi-rail money movement (ACH, wire, RTP/FedNow, card networks) and multi-FI orchestration, including direct integrations with sponsor banks and networks like Visa Direct rather than only processor intermediaries. - A high technical bar set through influence and example. You make the work and the people around you better, and you're as comfortable in the codebase as you are in a design review. Nice to Haves - Prior experience at a payments platform operating at comparable scale, at a company like Stripe, Block/Square, Modern Treasury, Marqeta, or Adyen. - Experience modernizing or hardening a payments platform at scale - taking existing, load-bearing systems and rebuilding them into best-in-class infrastructure without stopping the money. - Familiarity with PCI DSS, ISO 20022 messaging, and scheme-level settlement file formats. 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. ## About Payabli ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: Payabli provides a unified payments infrastructure platform that enables software companies to embed, manage, and monetize payment acceptance and payouts through a single API. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series B) - **Headquarters**: Miami, Florida, United States - **Founded**: 2020 - **Founders**: Joseph Elias Phillips (Co-Founder) and others (specific co-founder name not publicly listed) ## Core Business - **Primary industry/industries**: Fintech, Payments Infrastructure, Embedded Payments - **Target customers**: B2B; software companies (SaaS platforms, ISVs, marketplaces) that want to embed payment capabilities into their own products. - **Mission or purpose statement**: To make software companies payments companies™ by providing the infrastructure and expertise to turn payments into a core part of their business model. ## Products & Services - **Pay In**: Facilitates and monetizes payment acceptance from customers. Includes omnichannel support (online, in-person, wallets, bill pay, lockbox, RDC) via direct APIs and embeddable low/no-code components. - **Pay Out**: Enables platforms to issue payments to suppliers, vendors, and partners. Includes managed payables, on-demand payouts, vendor portals, and spend management. - **Pay Ops**: A suite of operational tools for merchant boarding, risk and underwriting, pricing and billing, and reporting/analytics to manage the entire payments lifecycle. - **Trusted Advisory**: White-glove integration support, strategic guidance on interchange optimization, pricing, and payment adoption, provided by a team of payment experts. ## Market Standing - **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed - **Key Metric**: Total Funding of **$96.05M** across 5 rounds (Seed, Series A, Series B, Corporate Round). Annual Revenue is estimated at **$6.5M**. - **Notable Investors/Partners**: QED Investors (lead Series A & B), Fika Ventures (lead Seed & Series B), TTV Capital (lead Seed), Bling Capital, Huntington National Bank (Corporate Round lead). - **Growth Signals**: - Ranked **No. 141 on the 2025 Inc. 5000 list** with 5X year-over-year revenue growth. - Named to **Inc.’s 2025 Best Workplaces** list. - **65.7% employee headcount growth year-over-year**, now at 95 employees. - Operates in **8 countries** (US, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Uruguay, UAE, Canada, India). ## Competitive Advantages - **Unified, Full-Stack Platform**: Unlike many competitors who specialize in only one area (e.g., just processing or just payouts), Payabli offers a single API for Pay In, Pay Out, and Pay Ops, simplifying the tech stack for software companies. - **Deep Payments Expertise**: Founded by industry veterans with over 18 years of experience; offers "white glove" advisory services and strategic guidance, not just a product. - **Transparent Economics**: Provides visibility into wholesale costs and offers flexible pricing and billing tools to help software companies maximize margin. - **Fast Time-to-Market**: Low and no-code embeddable components allow for rapid integration, getting platforms live "in days, not months." ## Strategic Focus - **Accelerating Innovation**: Using the $36M Series B (led by QED Investors and Fika Ventures, July 2025) to further develop its payments infrastructure and expand its product suite. - **Scaling the Partner Ecosystem**: Focused on onboarding more software partners and expanding into new verticals and geographies (evidenced by operations in 8 countries). - **Deepening Monetization**: Helping existing partners optimize their payments strategies to drive more revenue and customer retention through interchange optimization and adoption techniques. ## Why Work Here - **Culture & Recognition**: Named a 2025 Inc. Best Workplace. Employee reviews on Indeed highlight a "family-like" culture, respect, and a focus on employee well-being. - **Growth & Learning**: High-growth environment (5X revenue growth, 65% headcount growth) offers significant opportunities for career advancement and learning about the fintech/payments world. - **Remote & Flexible**: The company supports remote work (many roles listed as "Remote"), with a physical office presence in Miami and Phoenix. - **Engineering Focus**: The tech stack includes modern tools (APIs, Webhooks, Slack, Zoom). The engineering team makes up a significant portion of the workforce (32% of employees). - **Mission-Driven Work**: Employees work on a core problem for software companies—making payments a strategic asset—which offers a sense of impact and innovation. ## Sources 1. [Payabli.com](https://payabli.com/) 2. [Payabli About Us](https://www.payabli.com/about-us/) 3. [Payabli LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/payabli) 4. [Built In Payabli](https://builtin.com/company/payabli) 5. 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