Solution Architect (Payments)

Location: Almaty, Kazakhstan; Astana, Kazakhstan; Belgrade, Serbia; Cluj-Napoca, Romania; Krakow, Poland; Larnaca, Cyprus; Lodz, Poland; Lublin, Poland; Monterrey, Mexico; Montevideo, Uruguay; Remote.AR, Remote.LATAM-country; Remote.BR, Brazil; Remote.BG, Bulgaria; Remote.CO, Colombia; Remote.GE, Georgia; Remote.KZ, Kazakhstan; Remote.PL, Poland; Riga, Latvia; Rosario, Remote.LATAM-country; Sofia, Bulgaria; Tbilisi, Georgia; Varna, Bulgaria; Warsaw, Poland; Wroclaw, Poland; Yerevan, Armenia As a Solutions Architect, you will define and guide architecture across card acquiring and payment processing domains. You will work on transaction flows, processing and routing components, scheme and partner integrations, resilience patterns, and technical standards. You will work closely with engineering, product, and business stakeholders to translate complex payment requirements into scalable solution designs and guide engineering teams through implementation. - Define and evolve the solution architecture for card acquiring and processing capabilities, covering authorization, switching, routing, clearing, settlement and reconciliation; - Design end-to-end transaction flows for card-present and card-not-present scenarios, including authorization, capture, reversals, refunds and exception handling; - Design integration patterns with card schemes, processors, banks, payment gateways and merchant-facing systems, including ISO 8583 message flows and scheme-specific variations; - Define resilience and failure-handling patterns for high-throughput, low-latency transaction processing, including idempotency, retries, timeouts, duplicate detection and recovery; - Ensure the architecture meets PCI DSS and payment security requirements, including cardholder data protection and tokenization; - Translate business and product requirements into concrete technical solutions and communicate architecture decisions across engineering, product and business teams; - Remain hands-on and contribute directly to implementation where needed, particularly for complex transaction processing, integrations and core platform components; - Define technical standards and review solution designs and implementations across engineering teams; - Contribute to the evolution and modernization of payment processing capabilities and legacy components where relevant. - Strong experience as a Solution Architect, Technical Architect or Lead Architect in card acquiring or payment processing; - Proven experience designing or significantly evolving an acquiring platform, payment switch or card transaction processing system, including real-time switching and routing; - Deep understanding of the acquiring transaction lifecycle: authorization, capture, reversals, refunds, clearing, settlement and reconciliation; - Strong practical knowledge of ISO 8583, including message flows and scheme-specific implementations; - Strong knowledge of card-present and card-not-present transaction processing; - Good understanding of EMV and 3-D Secure transaction flows; - Experience integrating with card schemes, processors, banks, payment gateways or merchant-facing systems; - Strong understanding of distributed systems, including idempotency, retries, timeouts, duplicate handling and recovery scenarios; - Experience designing high-availability, high-throughput, low-latency transactional systems; - Good understanding of PCI DSS, cardholder data security, tokenization and payment security principles; - Strong software engineering background with recent hands-on development experience and the ability to contribute directly to production code when needed; - Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills; - Upper-Intermediate or higher level of English. - Hands-on experience designing and certifying direct acquiring integrations with major card schemes, such as Visa, Mastercard, UnionPay, JCB, American Express and Discover; - Experience with both POS and e-commerce acquiring; - Experience with HSMs, PIN processing, payment cryptography and key management; - Hands-on work with scheme clearing files and settlement processes, such as Visa BASE II and Mastercard IPM; - Experience with processing platforms such as Way4, BASE24, SmartVista, TranzAxis or similar; - Experience with acquiring platform modernization or migration; - Experience with event-driven or microservices-based transaction processing architectures.