Utilli - Principal Software Engineer - Technical Product Owner

The Role

We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer & Technical Product Owner who combines deep payment industry expertise, strong full stack development capabilities, technical product ownership, and engineering team leadership.

This is not a traditional product manager or people-management-only position.

You will lead a team of software engineers while remaining actively involved in architecture, design, development, code reviews, troubleshooting, and production releases.

You will be accountable for the technical direction, quality, reliability, and successful delivery of TilliPay.

The ideal candidate has built real-world payment infrastructure, understands how money moves through payment networks, and has the leadership skills to build and guide a high-performing engineering team.

Key Responsibilities

1. End-to-End Technical Ownership:

- Serve as the primary technical owner of TilliPay, accountable for architecture, engineering execution, platform quality, and reliability.

- Own technical decisions across payment acceptance, payment processing, payouts, settlement, reconciliation, and reporting.

- Establish and evolve the technical architecture and engineering roadmap.

- Translate business objectives into executable technical requirements and development priorities.

- Manage technical debt while balancing delivery timelines, scalability, security, and maintainability.

- Drive engineering execution from requirements and architecture through implementation, testing, certification, deployment, and production support.

2. Hands-On Full Stack Development:

- Personally design, develop, debug, and maintain production-grade software.

- Build backend payment processing services using Java and Node.js.

- Develop and maintain frontend applications using React, JavaScript, and TypeScript.

- Design RESTful APIs, microservices, and event-driven integrations.

- Implement transaction orchestration, routing, message processing, and payment lifecycle management.

- Perform detailed code reviews, contribute to complex features, and resolve critical production issues.

- Establish automated testing, CI/CD, observability, and performance engineering practices.

- Design secure, highly available, fault-tolerant financial transaction systems.

3. Payments, Payouts & Financial Messaging:

- Lead development of payment acceptance, authorization, capture, clearing, settlement, refunds, reversals, and payouts.

- Integrate with acquiring banks, processors, payment networks, financial institutions, and payout providers.

- Build payment facilitator capabilities including merchant and submerchant onboarding, transaction processing, funding, settlement, and reconciliation.

- Support payment methods and rails including cards, ACH/eCheck, RTP, FedNow, and domestic and international payouts as applicable.

- Design transaction state management, idempotency, retry handling, exception processing, and financial reconciliation.

- Develop and maintain payment message validation, transformation, routing, and troubleshooting capabilities.

- Payment messaging expertise is particularly important:

- Practical experience with ISO 8583, including MTIs, bitmaps, data elements, response codes, reversals, and processor-specific message implementations.

- Practical knowledge of ISO 20022, including relevant pain, pacs, and camt message families, schemas, payment instructions, status reporting, and reconciliation.

- Ability to interpret partner-specific implementation guides and support network, processor, and banking certifications.

- Understanding of how card networks and bank payment rails differ in messaging, clearing, settlement, and operational workflows.

4. Engineering Team Leadership:

- Lead, mentor, and manage a team of software engineers working across frontend, backend, and payment integrations.

- Provide technical direction, assign responsibilities, review designs, and ensure delivery commitments are met.

- Remain hands-on in critical code paths and technically complex implementations.

- Establish engineering standards for code quality, documentation, testing, security, and production readiness.

- Conduct technical reviews, coach engineers, and support hiring and performance development.

- Identify engineering bottlenecks, remove technical blockers, and improve team productivity.

- Build a culture of accountability, technical excellence, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

5. Technical Product Leadership:

- Own the TilliPay engineering backlog and technical roadmap in collaboration with business and product leadership.

- Translate customer, partner, compliance, and business requirements into technical specifications, user stories, and acceptance criteria.

- Prioritize features, enhancements, integrations, and technical investments.

- Coordinate engineering delivery across internal teams and external partners.

- Provide clear visibility into development progress, delivery risks, dependencies, and release readiness.

- Represent TilliPay in technical discussions with payment processors, banks, networks, and enterprise customers.

- Take ownership of the product's technical success - not just individual development tasks.

6. Security, Compliance & Production Reliability:

- Design and maintain payment systems aligned with PCI DSS and applicable security requirements.

- Implement secure payment credential handling, encryption, tokenization, authentication, and authorization.

- Support PayFac operational requirements, merchant risk controls, chargebacks, disputes, and settlement controls.

- Ensure transaction integrity through audit trails, idempotency, reconciliation, and appropriate financial ledger controls.

- Lead troubleshooting of complex payment failures and production incidents.

- Improve system resilience, monitoring, scalability, availability, and disaster recovery readiness.

Required Qualifications:

- 10+ years of software engineering experience, preferably including 5+ years in payment processing, banking, or fintech infrastructure.

- Strong hands-on experience with Java, Node.js, React, and JavaScript/TypeScript.

- Demonstrated experience building or significantly enhancing production payment processing platforms.

- Hands-on experience with ISO 8583 and working knowledge of ISO 20022, with direct implementation experience in both strongly preferred.

- Strong understanding of payment authorization, clearing, settlement, payouts, and reconciliation.

- Experience integrating with payment processors, acquiring banks, payment networks, or banking platforms.

- Experience architecting microservices, distributed systems, REST APIs, and asynchronous processing.

- Proven experience leading and mentoring software engineers while continuing to contribute production code.

- Experience managing technical backlogs, delivery priorities, releases, and engineering execution.

- Strong problem-solving skills and ability to independently own complex technical challenges.

Preferred Qualifications:

- Prior experience at a payment facilitator, acquiring processor, issuer processor, or payment infrastructure provider.

- Experience with Visa, Mastercard, Fiserv, FIS, or comparable payment ecosystems.

- Experience with ACH/NACHA, FedNow, RTP, SWIFT, and cross-border payments.

- Knowledge of merchant onboarding, submerchant settlement, risk management, and payment orchestration.

- Experience with tokenization, network tokens, digital wallets, and payment credential vaults.

- Familiarity with financial ledgers, double-entry accounting, and reconciliation systems.

- Experience with cloud-native architecture, containers, message brokers, event streaming, and CI/CD.

- Exposure to stablecoins, programmable payments, and blockchain-based settlement.

- Experience supporting payment network certifications and production financial integrations.

Skills

Full Stack, Java, Node.js, React.js, TypeScript, Javascript, RESTful API, Microservices Architecture, PCI-DSS, Payment Gateway, CI/CD