Position location: Austin, TX
Western Union is seeking Senior Architect on the Gateway Engineering team, you will lead the design and hands-on development of the APIs that power Western Union's partner ecosystem — money transfers, bill payments, money orders, and other financial services at global scale. You bring deep technical expertise and the leadership to match: writing code alongside
your team, setting the standards they work within, and shaping the culture that makes it all sustainable. You work closely with product and engineering to build a platform that is stable, efficient, and built to last. You are a classically trained engineer who treats AI-native development as a force multiplier — and you lead by example.
Role Responsibilities:
- Lead the architectural design of APIs used by Western Union's partners to initiate money transfers, bill payments, money orders, and other financial activities.
- Drive the migration of partner integrations from legacy SOAP-based services to modern RESTful APIs, including client onboarding, versioning strategy, and deprecation planning.
- Define and govern API design standards — including versioning, backward compatibility, contracts, error handling, and developer experience — across the Gateway platform.
- Build applications, workflow automations, internal tools, and basic agents using AI coding agents within Western Union's product and platform areas.
- Use AI to accelerate modernization, testing, documentation, observability, and engineering productivity.
- Drive engineering excellence through Agile methodologies, TDD, thorough code reviews, and CI/CD pipelines.
- Estimate engineering effort, plan implementations, and coordinate rollouts with cross-functional and cross-regional impact.
- Support engineering incidents and releases.
Role Requirements
- Bachelor’s in computer science or related fields with 10+ years of professional experience or master’s with 8+ years of experience. Equivalent work experience is allowed.
- 6+ years of professional experience designing and implementing RESTful APIs and microservices-based architectures deployed at enterprise scale.
- 5+ years of professional experience building backend applications and microservices using Java and Spring Boot framework (including Spring Cloud, Spring Data, Spring Security).
- Previously lead a SOAP-to-REST migration.
- Experience with event-driven integrations using Apache Kafka, JMS, or equivalent Pub/Sub frameworks.
- Professional experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
- Experience with observability and monitoring frameworks (e.g., Dynatrace, Splunk, or similar).
- Professional experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL, Oracle) and/or NoSQL data stores.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in Payments, FinTech, or Financial Services domains — particularly with partner or third-party API ecosystems.
- Hands-on experience with AI coding agents (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code) in a production engineering context.
- Experience with API gateway platforms (AWS API Gateway, Apigee, Kong, or similar).
- Experience with NoSQL databases (Couchbase, Cassandra, or similar).
Work Shift
HYBRID - Western Union values in-person collaboration, problem solving, and ideation whenever possible. We believe this fosters common ways of working and supports how we execute initiatives for our customers. The expectation is to work from the office a minimum of three days a week.
Benefits
You will also have access to short-term incentives, multiple health insurance options, accident and life insurance, and access to best-in-class development platforms, to name a few
(). Please see the location-specific benefits below and note that your Recruiter may share additional role-specific benefits during your interview process or in an offer of employment.
Your United States – Specific Benefits Include
- Paid Time Off
- Medical, Dental and Life Insurance
- Tuition Assistance Program
- Student Loan Repayment (below manager level only)
- Parental Leave
- One day volunteer time off
- $0 Money Transfer Fee Discount Code – Quarterly
- Recognition Program “Game Changers”
- Employee Discount Program
- Global Adoption Assistance
- Global Scholarship Awards Program
- 401K plan
Salary
Annual base salary range is $155,000 – 180,000 USD per year. Total on-target compensation includes a base salary and short-term that align with individual and company performance. Actual salaries will vary based on candidates’ qualifications, skills, and competencies.
As part of the application process, all applicants are required to take assessments. Western Union has partnered with a 3rd party provider to administer these tests. Applicants will need to provide their name and email address in order to process the assessments. If you have any questions, you may reach out to .
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Estimated Job Posting End Date:
07-06-2026
This application window is a good-faith estimate of the time that this posting will remain open. This posting will be promptly updated if the deadline is extended or the role is filled.
