> Markdown version of [/jobs/ext/3465488-principal-software-engineer-fintech](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/jobs/ext/3465488-principal-software-engineer-fintech). Every page supports `.md` or `Accept: text/markdown`. Links point to the HTML versions so they work for humans too. Agent guide: [/agents.md](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/agents.md).

---

# Principal Software Engineer, Fintech

- **Company:** PLUG TECHNOLOGIES, INC
- **Location:** Los Angeles, CA, United States
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Salary:** $222,256.0 - $259,324.0
- **Contract:** Franchise
- **Skills:** Artificial Intelligence, Distributed Systems, Payment Systems, Fault Tolerance, Software Engineering, Technical Debt
- **Published:** September 15, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=9a9708bdc1e95060

## About the Role

* 10+ years in software engineering, with 5+ years working on B2B and B2C payments solutions.
 * Direct experience designing and building payments, ledger, lending, or money movement infrastructure - not just consumer-facing payment systems.
 * A genuine taste for elegance: the ability to design within real regulatory and stakeholder constraints in a way that stays efficient and clean, rather than accumulating one-off exceptions and technical debt to satisfy each new requirement.
 * Proven experience designing systems within regulatory and banking-partner constraints - you understand what it takes to build infrastructure that a bank, processor, or regulator will actually sign off on.
 * Deep expertise in distributed systems: transaction integrity, financial data consistency, idempotency, auditability, and fault tolerance at scale.
 * A track record of owning architecture decisions end-to-end, from design through implementation and long-term maintainability.
 * Comfort operating with high agency in an ambiguous, fast-moving startup environment - you'll be the first and primary technical owner of this domain.
 * Strong cross-functional collaboration skills - you can translate complex technical tradeoffs for Product, Risk, Finance, and Compliance stakeholders.
 * International or cross-border money movement experience is a plus, but not required.
 * Experience with title, lien, lending, or marketplace escrow-like flows is a plus.
 * You work agent-first. You are comfortable orchestrating multiple coding agents, defining clear acceptance criteria, and reviewing AI-generated output to a high bar - and you have a point of view on where that is and is not appropriate in code that moves money.

## Description

Every transaction on Plug moves real money - consumer payouts, dealer settlements, lien payoffs, auction proceeds - and today those flows run on infrastructure that was built to get us to $100M in volume, not to $1B. We need a technical architect to design the money systems that get us there: a ledger and payments architecture that's correct, auditable, and fast, built to survive contact with banking partners, regulators, and scale.

We believe building consumer-facing product architecture and building money-facing architecture are fundamentally different disciplines, and rarely the same person's strength. This role exists because we need someone whose primary craft is the latter: designing systems that hold up under regulatory scrutiny, banking-partner constraints, and financial audit - not just under user load., * Own the architecture for Plug's money-facing systems: ledger, payment disbursement, settlement, reconciliation, and lien/title payoff processing.

 * Design a ledger that is deterministic, auditable, and gives a single, queryable source of truth for every dollar that moves through the platform.
 * Architect systems that integrate directly with banking partners, payment processors, and lien/title servicers - working within the regulatory and compliance constraints those partnerships require, and doing so elegantly rather than with brittle workarounds.
 * Make and document the core technical tradeoffs for financial systems: consistency vs. availability, idempotency, fault tolerance, and failure recovery for transaction-critical infrastructure.
 * Partner with Product, Risk, Finance, and Compliance to translate business and regulatory requirements into system design.
 * Set technical standards and review architecture for any system that touches money, acting as the final technical guardrail before it ships.
 * Mentor and raise the technical bar for engineers working in and around the money systems domain, without owning formal people management.
 * Evaluate and help decide when to build vs. integrate with external payments/banking infrastructure providers.