Lead Software Engineer - Payments

Narmi•New York, NY

About The Position

We are looking for a Lead Software Engineer to spearhead the technical evolution of Narmi Now, our flagship instant payments solution. Narmi Now is a direct-to-Fed integration that enables 24/7/365 real-time money movement via the FedNow® Service. As a Lead Engineer on the Payments team, you won’t just be writing code; you will be the architect of a highly resilient, low-latency processing engine. You will tackle the unique challenges of "faster payments," where the margin for error is zero and the need for sophisticated fraud prevention (Narmi Guard) is paramount. And lastly, you'll lead a small, talented team of engineers. At Narmi, how we work is just as important as what we build. We call this The Narmi Standard: High Ceiling: You go beyond the obvious, take initiative, and hold yourself to high standards with care. Low Ego: You put the mission above ourselves, share credit freely, and lead with curiosity. Alignment to Mission: You believe that helping community financial institutions win against Mega Banks and FinTechs is a worthy endeavor, and will use that belief as a northstar to anchor your efforts to that goal. High Commitment: You follow through, roll up your sleeves, and keep the bar high for yourself and others.

Requirements

Extensive experience building or scaling payment processing systems (ACH, Wires, Card Processing, or ideally, RTP/FedNow).
A proven track record of designing distributed systems that handle high-volume, mission-critical financial transactions with absolute data integrity.
Comfort working across a modern stack (Python/Django, React, AWS, PostgreSQL).
Experience with event-driven architecture (Kafka/RabbitMQ) is a major plus.
The ability to balance "slow is smooth, and smooth is fast" — building for long-term stability while maintaining the agility of a high-growth fintech.
8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with at least 2+ years in a Staff, Principal, or Lead capacity.

Responsibilities

Lead the design and scaling of our direct connection to the Federal Reserve, ensuring 99.99% uptime for instant credit and debit transfers.
Define the long-term roadmap for Narmi’s payment rails, transitioning from legacy batch processing to event-driven, real-time architectures.
Work closely with the Narmi Guard team to embed world-class identity decisioning and fraud mitigation directly into the payment flow.
Act as a force multiplier for the engineering org, providing deep technical mentorship, setting code standards, and conducting high-impact reviews.
Partner with Product and Implementation teams to turn complex regulatory requirements into seamless UI/UX experiences for both financial institutions and their end-users.