At Polygon Labs, we're building the infrastructure for an open, accessible internet of value. As Tech Lead, Payments, you will be the hands-on technical leader driving our vision for the Open Money Stack and On-Chain Money. You'll spend most 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.
What You'll Do
- 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.
What We're Looking For
- 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 Have
- 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.
Technical Stack
- Go
- Kafka
- AWS
- GCP
- Ethereum
Team & Environment
You will act as the technical authority for Payments, setting engineering standards, reviewing designs, and guiding other engineers.
Benefits & Compensation
- 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.
Work Mode
This is a global remote-first position.
Polygon Labs is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace and is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status.
