Principal Engineer - Payment Infrastructure

Traild: Who are we? 
Traild is a high-growth SaaS company redefining how finance teams operate, combining AI, automation, and payments infrastructure to power the future of B2B finance.

Every year, businesses lose billions to fraud, errors, and mistakes. Traild exists to solve this at scale, helping finance teams move faster, stay in control, and operate with confidence.

With rapid customer growth, global expansion across APAC, North America and EMEA, and continued investment in product innovation, we are at a defining stage of our journey.

This is an opportunity to help shape the next category leader in finance automation, control and security, building technology that transforms how businesses manage, move, and protect money. At the core of this is a powerful AI-driven platform, enabling finance teams to deploy intelligent agents that do the work, surface risk in real time, and continuously improve how financial operations run.

Traild is building the infrastructure behind modern finance, protecting and powering meaningful volumes of the world’s B2B transactions.

If you’re excited by high growth, real ownership, and building something that matters, Traild is the place to do the most impactful work of your career.

About The Role
Hear how Traild customers speak about us here.

We’re launching a new Financial Infrastructure team at Traild to build the next generation of our payments and platform capabilities from the ground up. We’re looking for a Principal Engineer to be a founding technical pillar of this team — someone who combines deep payments domain expertise, hands-on engineering excellence, and the technical leadership experience to shape how an entire system gets built.

You will play a core role in the architectural foundation of a distributed banking system built from scratch — owning the foundational decisions on consistency models, service boundaries, data durability, and system design that will run in production for years. This is a cross-team role. You will be hands-on within the Financial Infrastructure team while also working across Traild’s global engineering teams — shaping technical direction beyond your immediate team, mentoring engineers, and ensuring consistency and quality across the platform.

The Role: Want to be a part of our exciting growth journey? 

• Architect from scratch - Own the foundational architecture of a distributed financial system — service design, consistency guarantees, data models, failure modes, and operational patterns. There is no legacy code. The decisions you make first are the ones the team will build on.
• Stay hands-on - You will be deeply involved in the system day-to-day. You lead through doing, not only directing.
• Lead across teams - Work across the Financial Infrastructure team and Traild’s global payments engineering organization — aligning on standards, sharing architectural patterns, preventing silos, and representing the team’s technical direction to the wider company.
• Help build, mentor and elevate the team - You will be involved in hiring and building the team from the ground up. Invest in the engineers around you. Review designs, give deep technical feedback, and help senior engineers develop the skills to think and build at the system level. You raise the bar by example.
• Solve the hardest problems - Own the most technically complex and ambiguous work. When the team hits a wall on a distributed systems problem, a data integrity challenge, or a payments architecture decision — you are who they come to.
• Set engineering standards - Establish and champion the team’s engineering culture: quality bar, testing philosophy, system design practices, and how the team approaches operational excellence from day one.
• Shape the AI/LLM layer - At the edges of the system, design and build LLM-powered workflows integrated into the financial infrastructure. Curiosity about how AI can transform financial systems is a strong plus.
  
  

Who You Are:

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience with a strong backend and distributed systems focus.
• Payments domain expertise - You have directly built or architected large-scale payment infrastructure — payment rails, ledger systems, real-time payments, card issuing, reconciliation, or settlement.
• Proven technical leadership - You have functioned as a principal engineer, staff engineer, or solutions architect with influence beyond your immediate team. You have driven architectural decisions that shaped how an organization builds, not just what it ships.
• Built from scratch before - You have owned the 0→1 architecture of a significant system — greenfield, no legacy, foundational decisions yours to make. You know what that pressure feels like and what it takes to get it right.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems — consistency models, CAP theorem, event sourcing, idempotency, exactly-once processing. You have lived the edge cases in production, not just studied them.
• Production experience with Go and Python is a great plus.
• Deep experience building and operating production-grade systems on GCP at scale.
• A zero-compromise attitude on quality, testing, and system design. You have pushed back on shortcuts under real pressure and have the stories to prove it.
• Strong communication skills — you can explain complex architecture clearly to engineers at all levels and to non-technical stakeholders when needed.
• A modern engineering mindset: you actively use AI tools to improve your own velocity and code quality as well as mindset and experience building systems that can integrate and leverage AI as part of the flow if need, build apps that are AI ready
  
  

The Perks of Working at Traild  

• Flexibility: we offer a range of remote, hybrid and flexible working options. 
• Global team: we are growing across APAC, NA and EMEA and have team all across the world. 
• We are growing at an exponential rate, this is an opportunity to get involved with a true rocketship with all the excitement and opportunities that comes with it 
• Our team genuinely loves working at Traild: our eNPS score is 78, where anything above 50 is considered world-class.
  
  

Please note that the final applicants for this job will be asked to consent in writing to a police check / criminal background check to the extent permitted by law in your jurisdiction of employment. Please note that Traild is an E-Verify employer.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.