Lead Software Engineer, Payments

Lead Software Engineer, Payments

About DragonPay

DragonPay is building a modern payments platform for credit unions and financial institutions. We are looking for a hands-on Lead Software Engineer with strong payments domain knowledge to help build the platform and grow the engineering team around it.

The Role

This is an engineering-first leadership role. You will actively build production software while providing technical direction, reviewing work, establishing engineering practices, and helping develop the team.

You will work closely with Product, financial institutions, and technology partners to translate real-world payment requirements into reliable software.

What You Will Own

· Lead hands-on development across backend, APIs, integrations, data, and supporting frontend systems.

· Provide technical leadership, code and design review, and engineering standards across the team.

· Establish and lead the team’s AI-assisted development practices, using modern AI tools extensively across implementation, testing, review, debugging, and engineering workflows.

· Help hire, mentor, and develop engineers as the team grows.

· Design and build reliable transactional systems using a stack utilizing Node.js, TypeScript, SQL, APIs, cloud infrastructure, and modern integration patterns.

· Implementing practical standards for testing, security, observability and CI/CD with necessary rigor around idempotency, concurrency, and failure-mode testing given the demands of payment processing.

Desired Experience

Payments Domain

Strong hands-on experience building payment or financial-transaction systems is required. Experience should include several of the following:

· ACH, instant payments, cards, P2P, or cross-border payments

· Financial institution or core-banking integrations

· Payment routing, orchestration, and external providers

· Returns, reversals, retries, reconciliation, and exception handling

· Payment risk, limits, and operational controls

Experience with credit unions, banking platforms, payment processors, regulated financial systems, or 0-to-1 fintech products is especially valuable.

Engineering Leadership

· Experience leading engineers while remaining a strong individual contributor.

· Ability to turn product and domain requirements into practical technical designs and working software.

· Strong code review, mentoring, troubleshooting, and technical decision-making skills.

· Experience establishing development practices for a growing engineering team, including effective use of AI tools to accelerate implementation.

Technical

· Experience with durable workflow orchestration platforms (e.g., Temporal, Camunda, AWS Step Functions).

· Experience with multi-tenant SaaS platforms, including tenant isolation and per-tenant configuration.

· Strong Node.js and TypeScript experience highly preferred.

· Strong API, SQL database, integration, and data-modeling skills.

· Experience building scalable transactional and distributed systems.

· Understanding of idempotency, concurrency, asynchronous processing, failure handling, and recovery.

· Cloud (AWS or Azure), Docker/Kubernetes, CI/CD, security, and product operations experience.

· Practical experience using AI coding tools as part of day-to-day engineering.