Payments Engineer - Series A fintechLocation: San Francisco, CA (In-Office)
Partnership: EQL Tech has been exclusively retained by a high-growth Series A fintech startup to appoint a Payments Engineer to own the money-movement rails - card issuing, disbursements, reconciliation, and regulatory reporting - end to end.
The Role: Payments EngineerAs Payments Engineer, you will own every dollar that moves through the company's rails - card issuing, disbursements, reconciliation, and the regulatory reporting layered on top. You will work directly alongside the co-founders and the team's existing Payments Engineer (ex-Microsoft billing, ex-Goldman payments security) to build the technical backbone the company's mission depends on.
As Payments Engineer, you will:- Design a money movement flow: ledgered internal state, transaction lifecycle management, idempotency, retries, and deterministic replay so we can reason about every flow.
- Own card issuing and banking-rail integrations: work directly with partners like Lithic, Column, and LoanPro for card issuing, disbursements, and credit/loan management.
- Build high-trust, reliable reconciliation: daily/continuous reconciliation between internal ledger, card network events, banking events, and vendor/provider reports - and the tooling to investigate mismatches fast.
- Minimize operational risk: build guardrails that prevent bad states (double-spend, duplicate webhook processing, inconsistent balances, orphaned settlements).
- Payment Systems Architecture: Own and evolve a multi-service monorepo spanning an event-driven pipeline, a payments API (onboarding, credit, cards), balance healthchecks, and regulatory reporting jobs. Make architecture-level decisions on how to securely and reliably handle billions of dollars in state-funded educational payments, including fraud and credit risk controls.
RequirementsYour Profile- Obsessive About Correctness: You know that a missing cent compounds into a crisis. Retries don't erase history, idempotency is deliberate, and validation belongs where truth lives - the database.
- Assumes the Real World is Unreliable: Banks go down, queues back up, vendors change APIs without warning. You build systems that stay predictable anyway - "reliable" to you means consistent behaviour at 10 payments or 10,000,000.
- Craves Ownership: You want to be the single person everyone trusts when money is moving. You're not looking to contribute to a system - you want to have engineered it.
- High-Auditability Mindset: You're willing to go deep on a single missing transaction and trace it through every layer of the stack.
- Able to work in-person with the team in San Francisco, CA (visa support available)
- Experience with Lithic, Column, LoanPro, Stripe Issuing, or comparable card and banking infrastructure is a strong plus
BenefitsCommitment, Compensation & BenefitsThis will be a big commitment, and we're aiming high. It needs to be something you are energised about taking on, or this isn't the team for you.
- Competitive Salary: $125,000 - $175,000 per year, commensurate with experience.
- Generous Founding Equity: We compensate you well with equity.
- Top-Tier Backing: We've raised $16M from top-tier VCs and angels.
- Relocation Support: You are willing to relocate to San Francisco, CA, or Phoenix, AZ, and travel to visit customers. We're an in-person company and are in the office together.
- Comprehensive Visa Sponsorship: If you do not have a visa, we can support you.
- Unmatched Impact: The rare opportunity to directly shape how the $900B US Public Education budget is being opened up for parents to take control of their portion (avg. $7.5k/kid/year).
