Location: Riga, Latvia
Product: Payments / Acquiring (EMI journey, new company & product)
Employment: Full-time
Compensation: €5,000 – €6,000 net/month depending on experience
We are supporting a newly established fintech company in Latvia in hiring a Solution Architect to design the technical foundation of a new acquiring-focused payments platform.
The product will combine EMI capabilities, card acquiring, payment processing, and a merchant payment gateway. This role sits at the core of the platform architecture, translating business and regulatory requirements into scalable solutions for card processing, scheme integrations, and merchant payment flows.
We are looking for someone with hands-on experience building acquiring systems and working with Visa and Mastercard ecosystems, who understands the full card transaction lifecycle and can help design production-grade payment infrastructure from the ground up.
What You’ll Do
Acquiring Architecture & Platform Design
- Design the end-to-end architecture for the acquiring platform, covering the full transaction lifecycle including authorization, clearing, settlement, refunds, chargebacks, and reconciliation.
- Define the architecture of the payment gateway and processing infrastructure, including transaction routing, reliability mechanisms (failover, retries, idempotency), and scalable data models for financial and transactional systems.
- Ensure the platform is built for high availability, scalability, and low latency, while maintaining clear architecture documentation and technical standards supporting engineering delivery and compliance requirements.
Card Scheme & Partner Integrations
- Design and oversee integrations with card schemes (Visa, Mastercard), ensuring reliable authorization, clearing, reporting, and dispute management across the transaction lifecycle.
- Architect integrations with PSPs, processors, fraud tools, KYC/AML providers, and other external services, defining scalable connectivity and vendor integration approaches.
- Define API architecture and messaging flows for internal services and merchant-facing payment gateway integrations, ensuring scheme compliance and operational reliability.
Technical Governance & Security
- Establish and enforce engineering and architecture standards across the platform, including API design, logging, data validation, and service boundaries.
- Lead architecture reviews for new features, integrations, and infrastructure changes, ensuring technical quality and alignment before engineering delivery.
- Ensure security-by-design and regulatory readiness, including encryption, tokenisation, access controls, and architecture documentation supporting PCI-DSS and EMI licensing requirements.
Platform Reliability & Operational Design
- Design the platform for high operational resilience, including redundancy, failover strategies, and disaster recovery across critical payment flows.
- Define observability and monitoring architecture, including logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting for reliable system performance.
- Establish SLA/SLO frameworks and operational readiness standards, supporting incident management processes and platform reliability.
Engineering Collaboration
- Work closely with the CTO and engineering team to translate product and business requirements into scalable, delivery-ready technical solutions.
- Lead architecture discussions, design reviews, and solution design sessions to guide implementation and maintain architectural integrity.
- Identify and manage technical risks and integration complexity, supporting vendor selection, proof-of-concepts, and partner integrations.
Technology Stack
- Backend: PHP, Go
- APIs: Node.js (TypeScript), REST, gRPC
- Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, AWS RDS / Aurora
- Messaging: Kafka or RabbitMQ
- Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform
- CI/CD: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI
- Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch, Sentry
What You Bring
- Proven experience designing or building eCommerce acquiring systems
- Hands-on experience with Visa and Mastercard scheme integrations
- Strong understanding of the card transaction lifecycle (authorization, clearing, settlement, disputes)
- Experience working with acquiring platforms, payment gateways, PSPs, or payment processors
- Solid understanding of PCI-DSS requirements and cardholder data environments
- Experience designing cloud-native architectures on AWS and building robust API and integration architectures
Why Join?
- Opportunity to build an acquiring platform from the ground up
- Key technical leadership role with direct impact on product architecture
- Work closely with leadership, product, and engineering teams
- Build infrastructure designed for global payments scalability