AI Platform Tech Lead

DEUNA

$162K — $195K *
Finance & Insurance
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 6+ years in software engineering with strong backend foundations
  • 2+ years in a Tech Lead or Staff Engineer role
  • Proven experience deploying ML/AI systems in production settings
  • Experience in payments, fintech, or high-transaction environments
  • Familiarity with on-premise or hybrid infrastructure deployment
  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field.

Responsibilities

  • Design, train, and fine-tune ML models for payment optimization.
  • Architect and build optimized data pipelines for model training and inference.
  • Integrate ML model outputs into live payment routing layers without latency regressions.
  • Own the full observability stack including dashboards and alerting thresholds.
  • Provide architectural guidance to scale systems for 10M+ monthly transactions.
  • Lead and mentor engineers through technical planning and execution.
  • Translate business goals into technical roadmaps with clear timelines.

Benefits

  • Opportunities for career advancement and professional development.
  • Collaborative environment with a focus on innovation.
  • Flexible work arrangements to support work-life balance.
  • Access to cutting-edge technology and resources.
  • Engagement with a diverse team of skilled professionals.
Full Job Description
About the Role

DEUNA is a payments infrastructure company powering enterprise commerce across Latin America, the US, and Europe. We operate at the intersection of high-volume payment orchestration and applied AI - building intelligent systems that optimize authorization rates, reduce costs, and automate complex payment workflows for some of the largest merchants in the world.

We are looking for a Staff/Principal-level AI Platform Tech Lead to own the full technical stack behind our AI payment intelligence and digital workforce products - from ML model training through production routing integration. This is a hands-on leadership role: you will set the architecture, write the code, and grow the team.

What You Will Do
ML & AI Systems
  • Design, train, and own the full lifecycle of ML models for payment optimization - routing decisions, authorization rate improvement, cost reduction, and fraud signals - using PyTorch, TensorFlow, or XGBoost.
  • Build and operate LLM-powered workflows: LangGraph agent orchestration, RAG pipelines, and vector DB integrations (Pinecone, pgvector, or Weaviate).
  • Own the MLOps stack end-to-end: experiment tracking (MLflow / W&B), model registry, feature store, and automated retraining pipelines on AWS SageMaker.
  • Monitor model health continuously - drift, distribution shifts, retraining triggers - and define evaluation metrics tied directly to business outcomes.
Platform Engineering & Payments Integration
  • Build and maintain inference services in Go and Python integrated into live payment routing - strict latency SLAs (
  • Own AWS infrastructure: ECS/EKS, Terraform IaC, SQS/SNS event streaming, RDS/Aurora, and S3 for model artifacts.
  • Design and ship on-premise and hybrid deployment architectures for enterprise clients requiring local data residency, including secure data sync pipelines.
  • Apply PCI-DSS standards across all components touching payment data; implement tokenization in ML pipelines; design for PSP-specific behavior (Cybersource, Worldpay, Prosa, Cielo, Pagbank, and others).
  • Build and maintain RESTful and gRPC APIs that expose AI platform capabilities to merchants and partners.
Technical Leadership
  • Own observability end-to-end: Prometheus/Grafana dashboards, OpenTelemetry tracing, model-specific monitors, and on-call runbooks.
  • Set the engineering bar for the team: architecture reviews, code standards, testing strategy (unit, integration, shadow mode), and CI/CD practices.
  • Mentor engineers, run design reviews, and translate product vision into executable technical roadmaps with clear timelines and trade-offs.
Technical Skills

Backend / Platform
  • Go (production services)
  • Python (ML + tooling)
  • gRPC & REST APIs
  • Event streaming (SQS/SNS)
  • Distributed systems

Cloud & Infra - AWS
  • ECS / EKS
  • Terraform / IaC
  • SageMaker or Vertex AI
  • RDS/Aurora, S3
  • Hybrid / on-prem deploy

AI / ML Stack
  • PyTorch or TensorFlow
  • XGBoost / scikit-learn
  • MLflow / W&B
  • Feature stores
  • Model monitoring & drift

LLMs & Agents
  • LangGraph / LangChain
  • RAG + vector DBs
  • Prompt engineering
  • LLM evaluation
  • Structured outputs


Payments Domain
  • PCI-DSS compliance
  • Tokenization patterns
  • PSP integrations
  • Auth rate optimization
  • Routing orchestration

Frontend
  • React / Next.js
  • TypeScript
  • Component systems
  • API integration

Observability
  • Prometheus / Grafana
  • OpenTelemetry
  • Structured logging
  • On-call runbooks

Data
  • SQL (analytical)
  • Airflow / dbt
  • Feature pipelines
  • Data quality & lineage

What We Are Looking For
  • 8+ years in software engineering; 3+ at Staff, Principal, or Tech Lead level owning a production platform end-to-end.
  • Proven track record shipping ML/AI systems to production: training, serving, monitoring, and retraining - not just prototyping.
  • Hands-on LLM experience in production: agents, RAG pipelines, or AI workflow orchestration.
  • Payments or fintech background with practical knowledge of PSP behavior, PCI-DSS scope, authorization logic, and routing trade-offs.
  • Experience designing and deploying on-premise or hybrid enterprise infrastructure.
  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent demonstrated depth.


What we offer

  • A greenfield opportunity to define architecture, tooling, and engineering standards for an AI platform operating at scale across LatAm, US, and Europe.
  • Ownership of one of the most technically complex and business-critical systems at DEUNA - from model training through live payment routing.
  • Direct collaboration with product, operations, and modeling leadership - short feedback loops, high autonomy, real impact.
  • Competitive compensation, hybrid work and a team that takes engineering craft seriously.


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