Payments / Infrastructure Engineer

The Payments / Infrastructure Engineer owns the reliability, scalability, and correctness of Pathfinder's money-movement stack — card issuing, ledger integrity and reconciliation, CI/CD, monitoring, and scaling from hundreds of cardholders to hundreds of thousands. It's one role, not two: anyone genuinely strong at distributed systems and high-data-throughput work handles both the money-movement and platform sides. This is the bucket where things cannot break — if it breaks, the card stops working. The spike here is system design: understanding the system at a deep, holistic level across many tech vendors, knowing exactly where each part maps and how they work together.

Critically, no payments or fintech background is required — the founders launched a card in 74 days knowing nothing about it, and Pathfinder builds on best-in-class fintech rails that are relatively easy to pick up. Filter by skill (distributed systems + high data throughput + some security exposure), not by company. And they learned this the hard way: they took a payments engineer all the way to the work trial and passed because he kept mapping what he'd done before onto Pathfinder instead of reasoning from first principles — so first-principles thinking over pattern-matching is the real bar.

What You'll Own

• The money-movement stack end to end: card issuing, ledger integrity, reconciliation Reliability, scalability, correctness — a system that scales but cannot break
• CI/CD, monitoring, and scaling from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of cardholders
• Deep system design across many tech vendors — knowing how every part maps together

Requirements

• Spike in system design — deep, holistic understanding of complex multi-vendor systems
• Strong distributed systems + high data throughput; some security exposure
• Values reliability/correctness under pressure (a break = cards down)
• No fintech/payments background required — filter on skill, not company
• Reasons from first principles to prioritize — does not map prior work rigidly onto Pathfinder (the exact reason a prior finalist was passed)
• High agency, autonomous, flat/super-IC; healthy craft ego; listens and learns AI-native, not AI-dependent

Background

• At least ~2 years in distributed systems; mission alignment beats years (20 years means nothing without it; a 5-year engineer with the right systems work + mission fit is a strong yes)
• Prefer someone who saw scale happen fast at a Series B/C that blew up over someone with only big-co (e.g., last-2-years-at-Google) rigidity
• University not required if something impressive is present

Nice-to-Have (interesting sources)

• Jane Street, Citadel, Two Sigma, Optiver; AWS/GCP infra teams; cybersecurity companies
• Large consumer companies with serious infra (Airbnb, Booking, Meta)
• People who left Lithic or Unit 2+ years ago; Affirm engineers; pre-COVID Stripe; X1 or the Robinhood Gold card team
• A staff eng at Airbnb who personally led a high-throughput distributed system > a mid-level engineer at a small fintech.

Who Will Thrive Here

• A systems engineer who wants to own a money-movement stack that cannot break, from first principles
• Someone who's seen fast, messy scale and knows which hacks and tests to prioritize
• High-agency, autonomous, mission-driven, in person
• Wants depth of ownership over a rigid "this is how we did it at BigCo" playbook