Senior Technical Lead - Payments Engineering

Role Summary

We are seeking a Senior Technical Lead – Payments Engineering to drive design, architecture, and delivery of modernization initiatives across the global payments landscape. This role blends technical leadership, architecture governance, and team management, focusing on building scalable, secure, and high-performance payment applications aligned to evolving standards such as ISO 20022, SWIFT gpi, RTP, FedNow, and SEPA Instant.

The Lead will work closely with Product Owners, Business Analysts, and Transformation Leads, providing technical direction to development teams and ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture, integration standards, and regulatory requirements.

Key responsibilities

1. Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Define and oversee application architecture, design patterns, and coding standards for payment processing systems.
• Drive modernization of legacy payment systems through API-first, event-driven, and microservices architectures.
• Lead design of real-time processing frameworks, ensuring scalability, resilience, and low-latency transaction handling.
• Provide hands-on guidance on Java backend development, Spring Boot, RESTful APIs, and messaging systems (Kafka, JMS).
• Establish and maintain high-quality code review and DevOps practices, ensuring adherence to security, reliability, and compliance standards.

2. Delivery Management & Team Oversight

• Manage a team of Java developers, providing technical mentorship, workload planning, and skill development.
• Collaborate with BAs and Product Owners to translate business needs into technical epics, APIs, and sprint deliverables.
• Ensure development milestones, sprints, and releases are delivered on time with proper documentation and testing.
• Conduct design walkthroughs, peer reviews, and ensure code readiness for SIT/UAT and production.

3. Payments Domain Enablement

• Provide subject-matter guidance on SWIFT, ISO 20022, RTP, SEPA, ACH, and cross-border payment flows.
• Lead efforts for message translation (MT–MX), routing logic, and orchestration between payment gateways, screening systems, and reconciliation engines.
• Collaborate with infrastructure and security teams to ensure data encryption, API security, and resilience frameworks meet financial-grade standards.

4. Collaboration & Continuous Improvement

• Partner with DevOps teams to strengthen CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and deployment governance.
• Drive performance tuning, observability, and fault-tolerance enhancements across the payments application landscape.
• Support knowledge sharing, technical documentation, and cross-training to strengthen internal payments capability.

·        Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.

·        Certifications in Java, Cloud Architecture, or Payments (e.g., AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Finastra/FIS Platform Training) preferred.

·        10–14 years of experience in Java-based backend development, with at least 4–5 years leading development teams.

·        Strong expertise in Java 11+, Spring Boot, Microservices, REST APIs, and Asynchronous Messaging (Kafka, JMS, RabbitMQ).

·        Proven experience designing solutions for payment systems, gateways, or hubs, ideally with exposure to FIS, Finastra, Temenos, or VolPay.

·        Deep understanding of ISO 20022, SWIFT MT/MX message mapping, and real-time payment flows (RTP, FedNow, SEPA Instant).

·        Familiarity with cloud-native architecture (AWS/Azure/GCP), Docker/Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab, SonarQube).

·        Strong grasp of API security (OAuth2/JWT), encryption, and compliance for financial-grade integrations.

·        Excellent leadership and communication skills, with ability to guide teams, resolve blockers, and influence architecture decisions.

·        Demonstrated success in agile delivery environments, collaborating with cross-functional stakeholders across product, QA, and DevOps.

About Crisil Integral IQ: Crisil Integral IQ is the largest and top-ranked provider of high end research and analytics services to the world's leading commercial and investment banks, insurance companies, corporations, consulting firms, private equity firms and asset management firms. Crisil Integral IQ operates from centres in Argentina, China, India and Poland, providing support across several time zones and in multiple languages to global organizations. It has deep expertise in the areas of equity and fixed income research (covering global economies, 150 global sectors and over 3000 global companies), credit analysis, exotic derivatives valuation, structured finance, risk modelling and management, actuarial analysis and business intelligence.

Crisil Integral IQ includes Irevna, Pipal Research and Coalition, firms which were acquired by Crisil. For more information, please visit www.irevna.com, www.pipalresearch.com and www.coalition.com