Principal Engineer ​/ Architect

Principal Engineer / Architect — Fraud Prevention Technology

Senior technical individual contributor responsible for defining and delivering Client's next-generation fraud prevention platform. You will architect solutions that protect emerging product lines—including debit card and payments offerings—from Client fraud vectors, while remaining hands-on in code and system design.

Responsibilities:

• Define the technical vision and multi-year roadmap for fraud prevention systems across new and existing product lines
• Design and build real-time detection, decisioning, and response systems scaled to Vanguard's transaction volumes
• Drive adoption of AI/ML-driven development practices and embed intelligent automation into fraud operations and engineering workflows
• Serve as the technical authority on fraud risk for new product launches (payments, debit, etc.)
• Lead by example—write production code, conduct design reviews, and set engineering standards
• Partner with product, risk, compliance, and data science teams to translate fraud strategy into executable architecture
• Mentor engineers and elevate team capabilities without formal management authority

Qualifications:

• 12+ years in software engineering with 5+ years focused on fraud prevention, payments, or banking technology
• Deep domain expertise in payment networks, transaction monitoring, authorization systems, or identity verification
• Demonstrated experience architecting distributed, low-latency systems in a regulated financial environment
• Strong fluency in applied AI/ML—model integration, LLM-augmented tooling, or intelligent automation in production
• Track record of defining and executing technical strategy at staff/principal/architect level
• Comfortable operating as a hands-on engineer while influencing at the senior management tier
• Experience with industry standards and regulations (PCI-DSS, BSA/AML, Reg E, network rules)
• Preferred:
  Prior experience at a large asset manager, bank, or fintech scaling into new payment products
• Familiarity with real-time streaming architectures (Kafka, Flink) and decisioning engines
• Background in adversarial modeling or fraud ring detection