Principal Architect - Product Engineering

About Cari

The Cari Network is building a blockchain-based payment system powering real-time, 24/7 movement of digital money across the traditional finance and digital asset ecosystems. A pre-launch startup, we’re creating an entirely new category of financial infrastructure that brings cash on chain through tokenization while powering the full spectrum of payments for our network — banks and most importantly, the customers they serve.

About the Role

Reporting to the VP of Engineering, Banking, you will be the hands-on architect for everything Cari's banks and their customers touch: our bank-facing API platform, our operations dashboard, our white-labeled wallet interface, and the domain services behind them. You will lead our architecture practice—chairing the RFC process and design review and making architecture decisions within agreed guardrails—while writing production code alongside the team.

This role requires fintech or banking experience. You will have built money-movement, payments, or banking platforms that operate at scale under regulatory, security, and bank due-diligence scrutiny, and you know how banks actually integrate, reconcile, and operate.

Cari serves two very different audiences, and you will architect for both:

• B2B — bank API platform. Banks integrate server-to-server. That demands strict, versioned contracts, mutual TLS, API key lifecycle, signed webhooks, idempotent money movement, per-bank isolation and fairness, and Sandbox-to-Production parity.

• B2B2C — white-labeled wallet. A wallet that banks offer to their own retail customers, delivered either as internet-facing multi-tenant SaaS or deployed inside the bank. That demands tenant isolation, per-bank branding and custom domains, bank-to-Cari identity handoff, and secure embedding on end user devices.

Underneath both is one shared ledger that spans deposit balances held at a bank and on-chain tokens recorded on the Network’s blockchain, so correctness, security, and operability are not optional.

What You'll Do

• Write production code for most sprints. Build critical paths yourself, create reference implementations, and review the changes that matter most across TypeScript/Node.js services and React front ends. You will own at least one product capability and ship in it.

• Own the architecture of a scalable banking platform. Define service boundaries, API contracts, data models, and tenancy patterns that let Cari onboard many banks and their customers without re-architecting.

• Lead the RFC process and design review. Decide within agreed guardrails, escalate cross-Cari team and bank-contract decisions, keep durable decisions documented, and keep material technical debt visible and tracked.

• Own the bank API contract (B2B). Versioning, idempotency and exactly-once semantics on token transactions, webhook delivery guarantees, rate limiting and fairness across banks, and environment parity.

• Own the wallet architecture across deployment models (B2B2C). Multi-tenant SaaS and on-premises packaging, bank identity integration , tenant isolation, and secure embedding (content security policy, cross-window messaging).

• Design for ledger integrity end to end. Transaction state machines, failure handling, and reconciliation and drift detection between off- and on-chain balances.

• Turn non-functional requirements into built systems. Set measurable targets for resilience, performance, disaster recovery, and security, and deliver them in partnership with Cari Engineering.

• Be the technical counterpart for banks. Lead architecture walkthroughs, security questionnaires, and due-diligence reviews, and define integration patterns for core banking systems and digital banking platforms.

• Lead secure development. Threat modeling, penetration-test remediation, product-layer SOC 2 evidence, and software supply-chain controls in CI.

• Raise the bar. Mentor principal and senior engineers, and set standards for AI-assisted development and the guardrails around it.

What Success Looks Like in Year One

• The multi-tenant wallet SaaS is live with tenant isolation that passes bank security review.

• The bank API has a versioned contract with documented idempotency and webhook guarantees that match actual behavior.

• Critical ledger-integrity and resilience requirements are closed with evidence.

• The RFC and design review process runs predictably under your leadership.

• The platform onboards new banks without bespoke re-architecture.

Qualifications

• Fintech or banking is required: 12+ years building production systems, with significant time on payments, money movement, core or digital banking, or other regulated financial platforms.

• Required hands-on production experience with: Kafka (event-driven architecture), Restate (durable execution and workflows), Redis, AWS EKS, and Terraform.

• 3+ years as a hands-on architect or principal engineer, with a record of designing platforms that scaled across many institutional customers.

• Shipped both a partner-facing API platform (B2B) and a white-labeled or embedded customer-facing product delivered through partners (B2B2C, multi-tenant).

• Deep TypeScript/Node.js and PostgreSQL; comfortable reviewing and unblocking React work.

• Strong command of money-movement correctness: idempotency, sagas and outbox patterns, state machines, ledgers, and reconciliation.

• API and identity security: OAuth 2.0/OIDC, mutual TLS, API key and secret rotation, signed webhooks, and OWASP practices.

• Experience with bank vendor due diligence, SOC 2, or similar regulatory and security scrutiny.

• Designs for operability: instrumentation, failure modes, and runbooks.

• Clear written communication; RFCs and bank-facing architecture documents are core to the job.

Nice to Haves

• Fiat payment rails: ACH, wires, RTP, FedNow.

• Integrations with core banking or digital banking platforms.

• Blockchain experience not required but a strong bonus—tokenized deposits, stablecoins, custody providers such as Fireblocks, EVM/zkSync, or Solidity.

• Embedded SDKs, iframe or web-component delivery, and white-label theming.

• Experience leading an architecture practice at an early-stage fintech through scale.

Our Stack

Node.js 24, TypeScript, Fastify, PostgreSQL (Aurora), Kafka, Restate, Redis, React 19 / Vite, AWS EKS, Terraform and Helm, Auth0, Fireblocks, Foundry.

What This Role is Not

• Not a people-manager role—this is a senior individual contributor position.

• Not production infrastructure, SRE, or on-call ownership—those sit with our Platform Engineering team, whom you will partner with closely.

What We Offer

• Competitive base salary, bonus, and equity

• Full medical, vision, dental benefits

• 401(k) with company matching

• Flexible PTO in a remote-first environment

• Opportunity to shape a market-defining protocol with an experienced founding team

Security Responsibilities

Applies to all Cari employees

• Comply with all Cari information security policies, including the Acceptable Use Policy, and complete required security awareness training.

• Protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of Cari systems and data, including bank-partner and customer information, consistent with least-privilege access principles.