Tech Lead, Payments

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.

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. You will operate as an AI-native tech lead, using coding agents and AI tooling daily to ship at a velocity and scope that would traditionally require a larger team, and you will be expected to set the bar for how the Payments org adopts and compounds AI in its engineering workflow.

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.

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

• Set the standard for AI-assisted engineering on the Payments team, using coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, or similar) as a core part of your development loop, and shaping how other engineers adopt them for design, review, refactoring, and debugging

• 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

• 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

• Daily, hands-on use of AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or equivalent) in your engineering work, with concrete examples of how AI has changed how you architect, ship, review, or debug systems at scale

• High learning velocity, you pick up new languages, frameworks, and tools quickly, and you have a point of view on how AI-native engineering practices should evolve on a team you lead

• 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

• Experience building agentic workflows, MCP servers, or internal AI tooling that compounds team velocity

The goal of the Polygon Labs total rewards program is to support the health and well-being of you and your family. Our comprehensive compensation plan includes the following benefits for our full-time employees:

• 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

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.

Polygon Labs is committed to treating all people in a way that allows them to maintain their dignity and independence. We believe in integration and equal opportunity. Accommodations are available throughout the recruitment process and applicants with a disability may request to be accommodated throughout the recruitment process. We will work with all applicants to accommodate their individual accessibility needs.

If you think you have what it takes, but do not necessarily meet every single point on the job description, please still get in touch. We would love to have a chat and see if you could be a great fit.