Principal Architect, Payment & Fraud Systems - Atlanta, GA / Bellevue, WA

Principal Architect, Payment & Fraud Systems

Location: Atlanta, GA / Bellevue, WA Hybrid - in the office at least 3 days a week

Fulltime

Industry: Telecommunications Services

Job Category: Information Technology - System Development

At our company, we invest in YOU! Our Total Rewards Package ensures that employees get the same big love we give our customers. All team members receive a competitive base salary and compensation package - this is Total Rewards. Employees enjoy multiple wealth-building opportunities through our annual stock grant, employee stock purchase plan, 401(k), and access to free, year-round money coaches. That’s how we’re UNSTOPPABLE for our employees!

Job Description

The Principal Systems Architect crafts scalable, secure, and high-performance payment and fraud management solutions. This role focuses on payment processing, in-house tokenization, fraud detection, and risk mitigation across e-commerce, in-store, and mobile channels. The architect defines and maintains architecture, technology standards, and best methodologies for real-time transaction processing, middleware, and databases, encompassing both in-house development and third-party integrations. They provide leadership to project teams, ensuring compliance with industry standards, regulatory requirements, and internal practices. Additionally, the architect evaluates and recommends emerging payment technologies, fraud prevention techniques, and sophisticated security measures to improve the overall platform's resilience and efficiency.

We are a team that encourages innovation and advocates an agile and open approach, truly working and playing in the Un-carrier way!

Job Responsibilities:

• Help define software development processes and ensure alignment to security, compliance, and scalability methodologies for payment and fraud platforms.
• Stay up to date with emerging payment technologies, as well as fraud detection strategies, and regulatory requirements to continuously contribute to improvement of platform capabilities.
• Understand the business processes on assigned projects, particularly those related to payment acceptance, transaction routing, chargebacks, and fraud prevention.
• Accomplish organizational goals by accepting ownership for accomplishing new and different requests; explore opportunities to contribute to job accomplishments.
• Translate business requirements into technical requirements and assist other team members in implementing the solution.
• Design and implement real-time transaction refinement solutions that ensure high availability, reliability, and security.
• Provide architectural oversight for payment tokenization, fraud scoring models, and risk mitigation strategies across multiple channels.
• Collaborate with engineering, product management, security, and compliance teams to ensure flawless integration of payment and fraud technologies.
• Lead proof-of-concept (PoC) initiatives to assess new fraud detection techniques, machine learning models, or payment orchestration improvements.
• Optimize payment processing workflows to improve customer experience while maintaining fraud controls and cost efficiency.
• Ensure PCI compliance, data encryption, and secure API integrations for all payment and fraud-related systems.
• Develop and maintain high-level architecture diagrams, user documentation, and standard process guidelines for enterprise-wide reference.
• Provide direct technical evaluation of third-party products for inclusion in company solutions.

Experience Needed:

7-10 years of experience:

• In a business environment, preferably within payments, fraud prevention, financial services, or e-commerce. (Required)
• As a software or systems architect, engineer, or programmer, with expertise in scalable, high-availability platforms. (Required)

5+ years of experience:

• In payments architecture, tokenization, and transaction processing, including real-time authorization, settlement, and reconciliation workflows. (Preferred)
• In fraud prevention, risk management systems, and security architecture, with knowledge of fraud scoring models, ML driven, fraud detection, and chargeback management. (Preferred)

4-7 years of experience:

• In B2C online e-commerce systems architecture and design (Required)
• With payment orchestration, gateway integrations, and acquirer connections, including experience with PCI DSS compliance and 3DS. (Preferred)
• Using architecture and design of mobile web applications, including responsive design, hybrid models, and secure mobile payment solutions such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, or QR-based payments. (Required)
• Experience with cloud-based payment processing architectures, including AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, or serverless computing models. (Preferred)

Education:

Bachelor's degree in computer science, Information Technology, or a related discipline. Advanced degrees are a plus.

Licenses and Certifications:

Technology certifications (such as Java, Microsoft, Oracle, AWS, TOGAF, or security-focused certifications like CISSP, CISM, PCI-ISA) (Desire).