About the Role We are looking for a hands-on Solution Architect with deep, practical experience designing and building eCommerce acquiring systems to join our newly established fintech in Latvia. This is a pivotal technical role within a greenfield payments product combining EMI licensing, payment processing, and a payment gateway to create a high-performance acquiring business.
As Solution Architect, you will sit at the intersection of technical depth and commercial practicality, translating business and compliance requirements into robust, scalable architectures for card acquiring, scheme integrations, and merchant-facing payment flows. You will work closely with the CTO, engineering team, and external partners to ensure every system component is designed for resilience, performance, and regulatory fit from day one. We need someone who has built acquirers before, understands the nuances of card scheme rails, and can contribute directly to solution design, vendor evaluation, and integration architecture.
Key Responsibilities
1. Acquiring Architecture & Solution Design * Design end-to-end acquiring architecture covering authorisation, clearing, settlement, refunds, chargebacks, and reconciliation flows. * Define component architecture for the payment gateway and processing platform: transaction routing, failover, retry logic, idempotency, and state management. * Establish data architecture and modelling standards for transactional, financial, and reporting data (PostgreSQL/MySQL/Aurora). * Own architecture decision records (ADRs) and ensure technical design is documented, reviewed, and validated against operational requirements. * Design for scalability, high availability, and low latency, including horizontal scaling strategies, caching layers, and async processing patterns.
2. Scheme & Partner Integration Architecture * Define integration architecture for Visa and Mastercard ecosystems: authorisation, clearing files, scheme reporting, and dispute management. * Architect integrations with KYC/AML providers, fraud tooling, PSP/processing partners, and other third-party platforms. * Design message flows and ensure scheme-compliant transaction lifecycle management. * Evaluate vendor APIs and connectivity options (direct connections, hosted solutions, processing partners) and recommend fit-for-purpose approaches. * Define API contract standards (REST and gRPC) for internal services and external merchant-facing gateway APIs.
3. Technical Governance & Standards * Define and enforce engineering standards: API design, error handling, data validation, logging conventions, and service boundary patterns. * Lead architecture reviews for new features, integrations, and infrastructure changes, acting as a quality gate before engineering delivery begins. * Ensure security-by-design across all architecture: encryption at rest and in transit, keym management, tokenisation, access controls, and audit trail design. * Produce architecture artefacts that support regulatory and compliance requirements (EMI licensing, PCI-DSS scope, audit readiness).
4. Platform Resilience & Operational Design * Design for operational reliability: redundancy, failover, disaster recovery, and business continuity across all critical payment flows. * Define observability architecture: distributed tracing, structured logging, metrics pipelines (Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch), and alerting strategies. * Establish SLA/SLO frameworks for core acquiring services, authorisation latency, throughput capacity, error rate thresholds. * Support incident management design: runbooks, severity classification, escalation paths, and post-incident review processes.
5. Engineering Collaboration & Delivery Enablement * Work alongside the engineering team as a technical lead, available for design sessions, implementation guidance, and hands-on code review. * Translate high-level product requirements into well-defined technical specs and delivery-ready solution designs. * Identify and manage technical risk proactively, surface trade-offs clearly to the CTO and stakeholders with recommended mitigations. * Contribute to vendor selection processes: RFIs, proof-of-concept evaluations, and integration complexity assessments. * Participate in sprint planning and backlog refinement to ensure architectural intent is preserved through delivery. * Support external audits and security reviews when required.
Requirements * Proven, hands-on experience designing or building eCommerce acquiring platforms. * Direct working knowledge of card scheme ecosystems (Visa and/or Mastercard) authorisation flows, clearing, settlement, disputes, and scheme compliance requirements. * Understanding of transaction lifecycle from initiation through to settlement. * Demonstrable architectural work on acquiring-adjacent systems: PSP/processor integrations, fraud tooling, KYC/AML platforms, or chargeback management systems. * Strong grasp of PCI-DSS scope considerations as they apply to acquiring architecture, including cardholder data environments, tokenisation, and scope reduction strategies. * Solid background in distributed systems architecture: microservices, event-driven design, asynchronous processing, and API gateway patterns. * Experience with event streaming or messaging systems (Kafka or RabbitMQ) in the context of real-time payment processing. * Cloud-native architecture experience on AWS, including RDS/Aurora, EKS/ECS, networking, IAM, and infrastructure as code (Terraform).
Offer & Why Join Us * Key impact role with real ownership over architecture, delivery, and team growth. * Build a product from the ground up. * Lead a team where technology is central to the business. * Fast-moving environment with close collaboration with leadership. * Full-time official employment (Latvian contract) is available for this role. * The company offers flexible payout options and structures to accommodate candidate preferences. * Work Format: Remote-first, with the option to work from the office in Latvia. * Reporting Line: Directly reporting to the CTO.
Interview Process * HR Pre-screening. * Technical Interview with the CTO. * Meeting with the Owners. * Offer
