Principal Architect - Payments & Ledger

Job Summary

Principal Architect, Payments Ledger

Youll own the architectural direction for money movement end to end: multi-currency wallets and balances, the core ledger, card issuing and authorisation, in-app FX, overseas transfers and payouts, treasury and pre-funding, settlement and reconciliation, and the shared platform services underneath them. Your remit covers both YouTrip (consumer) and YouBiz (business), across every market we operate in.

Responsibilities

• The Ledger - Double-entry design, chart of accounts, sub-ledger boundaries, immutability and correction rules, multi-currency representation, precision and rounding policy, and how balances are derived or stored. Youll define how we handle authorisation holds, reversals, partial and incremental captures, refunds, FX revaluation and unreconciled positions, and youll be able to explain and defend those choices to Finance, auditors and regulators.
• Money movement correctness - Idempotency, exactly-once outcomes on top of at-least-once messaging, clear state machines for every transaction type, and well-defined failure, retry, timeout and compensation paths. For every integration, the question "what happens if the partner succeeds and we fail" should have a written answer that you own.
• Card issuing - Architecture for authorisation, clearing and settlement as a Mastercard Principal Member, including real-time authorisation on the schemes critical path, stand-in processing, authorisation expiry, disputes and chargebacks, tokenisation for Apple Pay and Google Pay, virtual and physical card lifecycle, and the strict latency and availability targets that come with it.
• FX and multi-currency wallets - Rate sourcing, quoting and rate locking, spread and exposure management, in-app currency exchange across our wallet currencies, and pre-funding and liquidity models that keep customers balances safe and available.
• Cross-border transfers - Corridor architecture, payout rail integrations (local real-time rails, bank transfers, SWIFT and partner networks), pre-funding and nostro design, and sanctions and AML screening built in as a core design constraint, not an afterthought.
• Reconciliation and settlement - We treat reconciliation as an architecture problem, not an operations task. Youll design systems where breaks are rare, spotted within minutes, and traceable to a clear cause, across multiple time zones, currencies and partners.
• Non-functional requirements - Latency, throughput, availability and cost as design targets with numbers attached. Clear, written decisions on where eventual consistency is acceptable and where it isnt. Recovery, replay and backfill as built-in capabilities.
• Standards and technical judgement - Engineering and coding standards, architecture reviews for significant changes, and architecture documentation that engineers actually build from. Youll write decision records that capture the reasoning and the options rejected, and keep them current.
• Partners and vendors - Technical evaluation and ongoing oversight of card processors, scheme connectivity, banking and settlement partners, FX liquidity providers, payout partners, KYC and screening vendors, and core infrastructure. Youll know their systems failure modes as well as their own architects do.
• Growing technical leaders - Youll mentor tech leads and senior engineers from day one and lead mostly through influence. As the function matures, youll build and lead a small architecture group.

• Deep payments and ledger experience (essential) - Youve designed or substantially rebuilt a production financial ledger. You can speak from real experience about journal design, posting models, balance consistency and correction strategies, including what happens when they go wrong.
• Card issuing expertise - Hands-on experience with card scheme integrations (ideally Mastercard), issuer processing, authorisation flows, clearing files, and disputes.
• A builder, not just an advisor - Youve written production code at scale, and your work sits behind systems that handled real traffic and real money. Your authority comes from having shipped.
• Range from system to field level - Youre equally comfortable designing distributed settlement flows and deciding the type and precision of a single amount field, often in the same week.
• Regulated-environment fluency - Experience with safeguarding and customer fund segregation, payment and e-money licensing, data residency, auditability and technology risk requirements, ideally including MAS and other Asia Pacific regulators. You design ahead of regulatory and scheme changes instead of reacting to them.
• Multi-market experience - Youve built systems that operate across several countries, currencies and regulators at once.
• Strong writing - Clear, structured, opinionated documents that remain useful long after the meeting ends. Documentation is part of the work, not a follow-up task.
• Opinions you can defend - Clear positions on design patterns, standards and trade-offs, explained just as well to a new graduate as to the board.
• Credibility with partners - You can tell when a vendors recommendation serves them more than us, and you can make that case with evidence.
• Experience with Golang, event-driven architectures and cloud-native infrastructure is a plus.

What This Role Is Not

This isnt a diagramming role, and it isnt a review gate that approves other peoples work without contributing to it. Its also not an engineering management role with large headcount or delivery ownership, though its influence is comparable. If youre looking to run a large organisation, we have other roles for that.