Senior Engineer IV (Java/Payments)

Location: On-site in Durham, North Carolina, United States

Company

Retail technology company providing store solutions and payment systems for major retail brands.

What you will do

• Own the TCP transport layer between payment terminals and the platform, including heartbeats, keepalives, idle connections, reconnects, and timeouts.
• Manage store-and-forward behavior for declined or unreachable authorizations and ensure correct fallback and replay decisions.
• Oversee BIN-based routing, processor and network selection, and contactless and EMV-related transaction requirements.
• Diagnose terminal exceptions and production incidents by identifying code, protocol, hardware, or firmware root causes.
• Define transaction-layer standards for retries, idempotency, failure classification, PCI compliance, and certification requirements.
• Mentor engineers, review transaction-layer changes, and direct AI coding agents with mandatory human review for PCI-scoped and transaction-integrity code.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or a related field.
• 8+ years of production distributed-systems development with Java and stateful protocol-level code.
• Direct experience with payment processing, card-present transaction flows, or other high-consequence partial-failure systems.
• Strong debugging skills for intermittent and timing-sensitive defects, plus experience with high-availability backend configurations.
• Working knowledge of PCI data security standards and proficiency with Spring Boot, sockets, Maven, CI/CD, and Git.
• Ability to read and debug Vue 3 and TypeScript POS client code, mentor engineers, and use AI coding agents professionally in production.

Nice to have

• Experience with EMV, contactless payments, issuer or network certification, store-and-forward patterns, or retail POS hardware.
• Experience with Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, SQL, MongoDB, REST APIs, and Swagger/OpenAPI.
• Experience directing bounded AI-agent tasks in regulated or high-consequence codebases.

Culture & Benefits

• Employment with medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• 401(k) plan with company match, life insurance, and pre-tax spending accounts.
• Employee assistance programs, pet insurance, and employee discounts.
• Paid holidays, vacation, and sick or personal days.
• Equal opportunity and diversity, equity, and inclusion commitments.