Software Engineer, Backend Developer, Software Architect

Netspend Corporation is a global, vertically‑integrated financial services and technology company dedicated to the delivery of innovative financial empowerment solutions to consumers worldwide. Netspend's financial products and services span prepaid, debit, cross‑border payments, and loyalty solutions for consumers and enterprise partners.
Netspend provides prepaid and debit account solutions that connect customers with secure, convenient access to global payment networks so they can manage their money and make everyday purchases. With a nationwide U.S. retail network, customers can purchase and reload Netspend products at 130,000 reload points and over 100,000 distributing locations.
Since our founding in 1999 by industry pioneers, Netspend products have processed billions of dollars in transaction volume and served millions of customers worldwide. The company is headquartered in Austin, Texas with employees worldwide.

We are seeking a hands‑on Staff Software Engineer to take ownership of our core card authorization platform. This high‑throughput, low‑latency platform processes real‑time debit and prepaid transactions over ISO 8583 for major networks including Visa, Mastercard, Pulse, and Fiserv. Because every request operates under strict latency budgets, high availability, and PCI DSS compliance, every millisecond counts—and every failure carries direct financial impact.

In this role, you will lead a team of talented engineers, drive the architectural evolution of our network connectivity and authorization services, and continue to write production‑grade code. You will serve as the primary technical point of contact for platform upgrades, network certifications, and production incident management.

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of 5–8 software engineers.

• Set coding standards, conduct architectural design reviews, perform code reviews, and foster technical excellence.

• Serve as the technical owner and primary point of contact for production health, network certifications, and platform upgrades.

• Design, build, and maintain high-throughput, low‑latency Java/Spring Boot microservices covering authorizations, financial transactions, advices, reversals, and stand‑in processing.

• Manage long‑lived client/server TCP connections to card networks, ensuring robust handling of sign‑on/sign‑off, echo tests, request/response matching, and automatic failovers.

• Architect distributed transaction boundaries ensuring data consistency across Oracle, Kafka, JMS, and downstream services through idempotency, compensation/saga patterns, and reversal handling.

• Implement resilient concurrency models: tune thread pools and executors, control back pressure, execute row‑level/distributed locking, and eliminate race conditions on balances and card states.

• Build fault‑tolerant systems using resilience patterns (circuit breakers, bulkheads, time limiters, retries, and graceful degradation).

• Drive platform modernization initiatives, including Spring Boot 2.7 → 3.5 / Jakarta EE migration, removing legacy RMI/JMX remoting, and containerizing microservices for Kubernetes deployment.

• Collaborate with Security and HSM teams to integrate EMV cryptogram processing (ARQC), CVV/dCVV/CVC3 validation, and HSM key management.

• Maintain strict PCI DSS compliance across all services (PAN masking, sensitive authentication data protection, secure logging, and secrets management).

• Define SLIs/SLOs and create comprehensive dashboards and alerts using Dynatrace and Splunk.

• Lead incident response efforts, drive root‑cause analysis (RCA), and implement permanent…