Senior Architect, Software Engineering — Gateway Platform

Western Union•Austin, TX

5d•Hybrid

About The Position

Western Union is seeking a Senior Architect on the Gateway Engineering team. In this role, you will lead the design and hands-on development of the APIs that power Western Union's partner ecosystem, supporting money transfers, bill payments, money orders, and other financial services at a global scale. You will bring deep technical expertise and leadership, writing code alongside your team, setting standards, and shaping a sustainable culture. You will collaborate closely with product and engineering to build a stable, efficient, and long-lasting platform. You are a classically trained engineer who views AI-native development as a force multiplier and leads by example.

Requirements

Bachelor’s in computer science or related fields with 10+ years of professional experience or master’s with 8+ years of experience. Equivalent work experience is allowed.
6+ years of professional experience designing and implementing RESTful APIs and microservices-based architectures deployed at enterprise scale.
5+ years of professional experience building backend applications and microservices using Java and Spring Boot framework (including Spring Cloud, Spring Data, Spring Security).
Previously lead a SOAP-to-REST migration.
Experience with event-driven integrations using Apache Kafka, JMS, or equivalent Pub/Sub frameworks.
Professional experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
Experience with observability and monitoring frameworks (e.g., Dynatrace, Splunk, or similar).
Professional experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL, Oracle) and/or NoSQL data stores.

Nice To Haves

Experience in Payments, FinTech, or Financial Services domains — particularly with partner or third-party API ecosystems.
Hands-on experience with AI coding agents (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code) in a production engineering context.
Experience with API gateway platforms (AWS API Gateway, Apigee, Kong, or similar).
Experience with NoSQL databases (Couchbase, Cassandra, or similar).

Responsibilities

Lead the architectural design of APIs used by Western Union's partners to initiate money transfers, bill payments, money orders, and other financial activities.
Drive the migration of partner integrations from legacy SOAP-based services to modern RESTful APIs, including client onboarding, versioning strategy, and deprecation planning.
Define and govern API design standards — including versioning, backward compatibility, contracts, error handling, and developer experience — across the Gateway platform.
Build applications, workflow automations, internal tools, and basic agents using AI coding agents within Western Union's product and platform areas.
Use AI to accelerate modernization, testing, documentation, observability, and engineering productivity.
Drive engineering excellence through Agile methodologies, TDD, thorough code reviews, and CI/CD pipelines.
Estimate engineering effort, plan implementations, and coordinate rollouts with cross-functional and cross-regional impact.
Support engineering incidents and releases.