Staff Software Engineer (Card Authorization & ISO 8583 Platform)

About the Company:

Netspend Corporation is a global, vertically-integrated financial services and technology company dedicated to the delivery of innovative financial empowerment solutions to consumers worldwide. Netspend's financial products and services span prepaid, debit, cross-border payments, and loyalty solutions for consumers and enterprise partners.

Netspend provides prepaid and debit account solutions that connect customers with secure, convenient access to global payment networks so they can manage their money and make everyday purchases. With a nationwide U.S. retail network, customers can purchase and reload Netspend products at 130,000 reload points and over 100,000 distributing locations.

Since our founding in 1999 by industry pioneers, Netspend products have processed billions of dollars in transaction volume and served millions of customers worldwide. The company is headquartered in Austin, Texas with employees worldwide.

About the Role

We are seeking a hands-on Staff Software Engineer to take ownership of our core card authorization platform. This high-throughput, low-latency platform processes real-time debit and prepaid transactions over ISO 8583 for major networks including Visa, Mastercard, Pulse, and Fiserv. Because every request operates under strict latency budgets, high availability, and PCI DSS compliance, every millisecond counts—and every failure carries direct financial impact.

In this role, you will lead a team of talented engineers, drive the architectural evolution of our network connectivity and authorization services, and continue to write production-grade code. You will serve as the primary technical point of contact for platform upgrades, network certifications, and production incident management.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Team Management

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of 5–8 software engineers.

• Set coding standards, conduct architectural design reviews, perform code reviews, and foster technical excellence.

• Serve as the technical owner and primary point of contact for production health, network certifications, and platform upgrades.

Core Architecture & Engineering

• Design, build, and maintain high-throughput, low-latency Java/Spring Boot microservices covering authorizations, financial transactions, advices, reversals, and stand-in processing.

• Manage long-lived client/server TCP connections to card networks, ensuring robust handling of sign-on/sign-off, echo tests, request/response matching, and automatic failovers.

• Architect distributed transaction boundaries ensuring data consistency across Oracle, Kafka, JMS, and downstream services through idempotency, compensation/saga patterns, and reversal handling.

• Implement resilient concurrency models: tune thread pools and executors, control backpressure, execute row-level/distributed locking, and eliminate race conditions on balances and card states.

• Build fault-tolerant systems using resilience patterns (circuit breakers, bulkheads, time limiters, retries, and graceful degradation).

Platform Modernization & Security

• Drive platform modernization initiatives, including Spring Boot 2.7 → 3.5 / Jakarta EE migration, removing legacy RMI/JMX remoting, and containerizing microservices for Kubernetes deployment.

• Collaborate with Security and HSM teams to integrate EMV cryptogram processing (ARQC), CVV/dCVV/CVC3 validation, and HSM key management.

• Maintain strict PCI DSS compliance across all services (PAN masking, sensitive authentication data protection, secure logging, and secrets management).

Operations & Stakeholder Engagement

• Define SLIs/SLOs and create comprehensive dashboards and alerts using Dynatrace and Splunk.

• Lead incident response efforts, drive root-cause analysis (RCA), and implement permanent remediations.

• Partner with Product, Network/Scheme partners, QA, and Operations to navigate card network mandates, network certifications, and release schedules.

Requirements & Qualifications

Must-Have Skills & Experience

• Experience & Leadership: 10–15 years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years leading engineering teams or driving technical architecture.

• Core Java Mastery: Expert-level proficiency in Java (11/17+), deep understanding of java.util.concurrent, JVM internals, garbage collection tuning, and memory analysis.

• Spring Framework: Extensively hands-on with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud microservices (Config, OpenFeign, Actuator, Security).

• Distributed Transactions & Systems: Proven expertise in transaction management trade-offs (2PC/XA vs. Saga pattern, outbox pattern, idempotent consumers/producers, and delivery semantics).

• Database & RDBMS: Deep relational database skills (Oracle preferred), including JDBC transaction isolation, SELECT ... FOR UPDATE, deadlock analysis, and SQL query tuning.

• Messaging & Event Streaming: Real-world experience with event-driven architectures using Apache Kafka (Avro, Schema Registry) and/or JMS (ActiveMQ).

• System Resilience: Hands-on experience implementing resilience frameworks (Resilience4j or similar) for high-availability systems running thousands of TPS.

• DevOps & Quality: Practical experience with CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI/Jenkins), Gradle, static code/security analysis (SonarQube, SAST, Trivy), and test automation frameworks (JUnit 5, Mockito).

• Communication: Exceptional verbal and written communication skills with a proven ability to translate complex technical trade-offs for engineers, product leads, and executive leadership.

Good-to-Have Skills

• jPOS Framework: Experience with ISOMsg, custom packagers, channels (PostChannel, BaseChannel), ISOMUX/QMUX, ISOServer, and Q2 configuration.

• ISO 8583 Specifications: Hands-on experience with Visa Base I, Mastercard MIP/Debit, Pulse, or Fiserv STAR/Accel specifications (messages 0100/0110, 0200/0210, 0400/0420, 0800 network management, DE55 EMV TLV data).

• Observability Tools: Advanced usage of Dynatrace (PurePath, Smartscape, DQL) and Splunk (SPL query generation, alerting, dashboards).

• Advanced Concurrency: In-depth familiarity with ReentrantLock, StampedLock, distributed locks (ShedLock, Redisson), Java 21 Virtual Threads, and Micrometer metrics integration.

• Card Payments Domain: Understanding of EMV chip/contactless flows, stand-in processing, settlement, chargebacks, HSM integration (Atalla, Thales payShield), and key management (KEK, ZPK, key blocks).

• Infrastructure & Rules: Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, AWS (MSK, IAM), and business rules engines (Drools, Jess).

Education

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline (or equivalent practical experience).

• Direct experience in the Payments, Fintech, or Banking domain is strongly preferred.

• 10–15 years of professional experience in designing, coding, developing, and scaling high-throughput, enterprise-grade Java/J2EE applications.

• 3+ years of hands-on experience in a technical lead or architectural capacity—driving system design, leading 5–8 engineers, and setting coding/quality standards.

• Proven track record of architecting low-latency, mission-critical distributed systems operating under strict SLAs and high concurrency.