Lead Payments Architect (Core Acquiring & Host Integration)

Project overview

We are taking an end-to-end leadership role as a strategic co-creator to design, architect, and deliver a landmark merchant acquiring and transaction processing infrastructure for a next-generation Digital Currency. Moving away from traditional vendor-buyer models, we are shaping the future of European sovereign payments from scratch in a high-velocity greenfield environment.

As the Lead Payments Architect, you will own the transactional backbone of our Digital Euro merchant acquiring engine—bridging high-throughput backend structures and core payment processors with cutting-edge mobile proximity payments.

What we offer:

• 100% greenfield architecture built from scratch for a strategic European sovereign payments initiative.
• Direct architectural ownership over core acquiring, clearing, and ledger infrastructure.
• Long-term B2B cooperation with flexible remote work and top-tier market rates.
• Architect the core acquiring engine, including state machines, transaction routing logic, real-time status management, multi-party fee splits, reversals, and automated partial refunds.
• Own the ledger and clearing lifecycle: design data models and automated jobs for merchant onboarding hierarchies, account mapping, daily clearing file generation, and settlement routing.
• Drive host and gateway integrations by designing high-availability abstraction layers and secure API bridges between core banking/acquiring platforms (e.g., FIS) and edge delivery networks.
• Define the data and performance strategy to guarantee zero-downtime operation, strong eventual consistency, and rigid auditing compliance under extreme transaction loads.
• 8+ years of experience as a Software or Solution Architect focused exclusively on core payment gateways, Payment Service Providers (PSPs), or core banking acquiring hosts.
• Mastery of transactional financial messaging standards (ISO 20022 and ISO 8583) and enterprise integration patterns.
• Deep architectural experience with distributed microservices (Java, Go, or .NET Core) and event-driven streaming architectures (Kafka, RabbitMQ).
• Hands-on expertise in designing highly optimized relational and distributed databases handling extreme transaction velocities with zero-downtime tolerance.
• Proven track record in designing financial ledgers, clearing file generation, automated settlement routing, and multi-source reconciliation lifecycles.
• Strong understanding of high-availability abstraction layers, strong eventual consistency, and strict financial data auditing boundaries.

Project details

• Start: ASAP
• Remote: hybrid
• Location: Remote, Warszawa, PL
• Languages: English