Tech Lead, Payments

Polygon Labs

10d•Remote

About The Position

Polygon Labs is a global blockchain payments company building and operating infrastructure to move money instantly, reliably, and at internet scale, with the mission to move all money onchain. It is building the Polygon Open Money Stack, an open and integrated stack of services and technologies to instantly and reliably move money anywhere, and put it to work. Its infrastructure has facilitated trillions of dollars in onchain value transfer and supported millions of transactions daily for some of the globe's largest banks, fintechs, enterprises, and consumer applications. Your Role Do you want to architect and build a modern payments platform from the ground up — not just manage it? As Tech Lead, Payments at Polygon Labs, you will be the hands-on technical driver behind the Open Money Stack and On-Chain Money vision. This is a deeply technical role: you will spend the majority of your time writing production-grade Go, designing core services, and making foundational architecture decisions that power fiat and blockchain-based payment flows at scale. This is a greenfield opportunity with startup intensity — high ownership, high velocity, and the ability to shape systems before they solidify. You will act as the technical authority for Payments, setting engineering standards, reviewing designs, and guiding other engineers through complex distributed systems challenges — while remaining deeply embedded in the codebase. If you thrive on building mission-critical financial infrastructure, care about clean system design, and want to help move global payments onchain, this role is built for you.

Requirements

8+ years of backend engineering experience, including building high-availability, mission-critical financial or payment systems
Strong production experience in Go, with deep understanding of concurrency, memory management, and performance optimization
Proven experience designing distributed, event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka or similar messaging systems) and microservices-based systems
Experience integrating with payment rails (e.g., ACH, SEPA, card networks) and/or blockchain-based payment flows (wallets, custody, stablecoins)
Strong understanding of cloud-native infrastructure (AWS and/or GCP), networking fundamentals, and containerized deployments (GCP preferred)
Experience building systems in regulated environments with security, auditability, and compliance considerations built into system design

Nice To Haves

Experience building greenfield financial platforms or working in high-growth fintech environments
Familiarity with Ethereum or other smart contract platforms
Experience designing internal ledgering systems or real-time reconciliation engines
Strong opinions on developer productivity, automation, and engineering excellence

Responsibilities

As the technical lead for the Payments domain, you will design and build the core systems powering Polygon Labs’ Open Money Stack.
Architect and implement high-throughput, low-latency payment services in Go across fiat and blockchain-based flows
Design greenfield distributed systems, including ledgering, settlement orchestration, reconciliation, and partner integration layers
Build event-driven microservices using modern messaging systems and cloud-native patterns
Define service boundaries, data models, and integration contracts across synchronous and asynchronous systems
Establish engineering standards for reliability, observability, security, and performance across the Payments stack
Lead technical design reviews and support other engineers through complex architectural decisions without formal people management responsibilities
Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Compliance, and Infrastructure teams to deliver secure, enterprise-grade payment capabilities
Contribute directly to production code daily and take ownership of system performance in live environments

Benefits

Remote first global workforce
Industry-leading Medical, Dental and Vision health insurance
Company matching 401k with 3% match
$1,500 Home Office Set Up Allowance (lifetime max)
$200 AI Program Allowance
$75 Monthly internet or phone reimbursement
Flexible Time Off
Company issued laptop
Egg freezing, mental health, and employee wellness benefits
In certain countries medical, dental and vision is fully covered for employees and their dependents. This is country and plan specific.
401k is for United States employees only