Principal Engineer / Architect

We are seeking a Principal Engineer / Architect to define and deliver a next-generation fraud prevention platform as the organization expands into new financial product offerings, including a debit card initiative. Operating within the strategy team, you will serve as the technical authority on fraud risk and architecture, designing real-time detection and decisioning systems, integrating AI/ML capabilities, and establishing long-term technical roadmaps to protect the business against emerging fraud vectors in a heavily regulated environment. This is a 6+ month contract position based in Plano, Texas.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the multi-year technical vision for future-state fraud prevention systems across new and existing product lines
• Design and build real-time detection, decisioning, and response systems capable of operating reliably at high transaction volumes
• Serve as the technical authority on fraud risk for new launches, partnering with payment processors and external financial partners for emerging payment initiatives
• Drive the adoption of AI/ML-driven development, LLM-augmented tooling, and intelligent automation across engineering and fraud operations workflows
• Conduct design reviews, write high-impact production code where needed, establish technical standards, and mentor engineers
• Partner closely with product, risk, compliance, data science, and business leadership to align engineering execution with overall risk strategy

Qualifications

• Required

• 12+ years in software engineering with primary focus on banking, payments, transaction monitoring, or fraud prevention

• Deep understanding of payment networks, authorization systems, identity verification, and financial regulations (PCI-DSS, BSA/AML, Reg E)

• Proven track record architecting distributed, low-latency, real-time systems in a regulated financial environment

• Demonstrated experience integrating applied machine learning, automated decisioning, or intelligent tools into production

• Experience operating at a Staff/Principal/Architect level, influencing executive leadership while staying technically hands-on

• Preferred

• Experience at a major bank, asset manager, or fintech scaling into new payment or debit products

• Hands-on familiarity with real-time streaming architectures (Kafka, Flink) and complex decision engines

• Background in adversarial modeling, behavioral analytics, or fraud ring detection

• AWS cloud architecture experience