Principal Engineer / Architect

Principal Engineer / Architect

Hybird Malvern, PA

Principal Engineer / Architect - Fraud Prevention Technology

Senior technical individual contributor responsible for defining and delivering Vanguard's next-generation fraud prevention platform. You will architect solutions that protect emerging product lines-including debit card and payments offerings-from novel fraud vectors, while remaining hands-on in code and system design.

Responsibilities

- Define the technical vision and multi-year roadmap for fraud prevention systems across new and existing product lines

- Design and build real-time detection, decisioning, and response systems scaled to Vanguard's transaction volumes

- Drive adoption of AI/ML-driven development practices and embed intelligent automation into fraud operations and engineering workflows

- Serve as the technical authority on fraud risk for new product launches (payments, debit, etc.)

- Lead by example-write production code, conduct design reviews, and set engineering standards

- Partner with product, risk, compliance, and data science teams to translate fraud strategy into executable architecture

- Mentor engineers and elevate team capabilities without formal management authority

Qualifications

- 12+ years in software engineering with 5+ years focused on fraud prevention, payments, or banking technology

- Deep domain expertise in payment networks, transaction monitoring, authorization systems, or identity verification

- Demonstrated experience architecting distributed, low-latency systems in a regulated financial environment

- Strong fluency in applied AI/ML-model integration, LLM-augmented tooling, or intelligent automation in production

- Track record of defining and executing technical strategy at staff/principal/architect level

- Comfortable operating as a hands-on engineer while influencing at the senior management tier

- Experience with industry standards and regulations (PCI-DSS, BSA/AML, Reg E, network rules)

Preferred

- Prior experience at a large asset manager, bank, or fintech scaling into new payment products

- Familiarity with real-time streaming architectures (Kafka, Flink) and decisioning engines

- Background in adversarial modeling or fraud ring detection