Engineering Lead, PayIn - Payabli

About Payabli

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.

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.

We're looking for a mature operator who has been there, seen that, and done it before. You've led teams the business can't run without, and you know what that takes: setting clear expectations, building the context and visibility to know what's really happening, and making hard decisions on both the technical and people fronts - then owning the outcome. You bring steady judgment when the stakes are high, hold a critical team to a high standard, and look around corners so you find trouble before it finds us.

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

• 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.
• Proven scale: You've led through significant growth in volume, partners, and complexity, and can show how reliability, quality, and delivery improved together.
• People leadership: You define what good looks like, build accountability, and make hard people decisions - hiring, performance, team structure - with care and conviction.
• Visibility and metrics: You know what's happening across your team and systems before anyone has to ask, through metrics, SLOs, incident practices, and operating rhythms.
• Technical judgment: 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.
• Hands-on backend depth: Deep engineering experience in modern languages with a strong grasp of distributed systems, relational databases, background processing, and cloud architecture from first principles.
• API design expertise: Experience designing and evolving RESTful and event-driven APIs that external developers depend on (versioning, backward compatibility, idempotency, webhooks).
• Exceptional communication: You can explain tradeoffs to partners, PMs, and cross-functional teams, and push back effectively based on data and technical realities.

Nice to Haves

• Direct integration experience with card processors and acquirers, including settlement and funding files.
• Card-present experience (semi-integrated terminals, Tap to Pay/SoftPOS, or device management).
• Check processing experience (lockbox, X9, 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.

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, and vision insurance
• 401(k), HSA, and pre-tax savings programs