Principal Engineer Architect

• We are seeking a Principal Engineer / Architect to lead the Payments Architecture and Engineering portfolio across Retail and E commerce platforms. This role is responsible for defining the architectural vision, driving technical strategy, and guiding engineering teams in building secure, scalable, and highly available payment systems.
• The ideal candidate brings deep payment-domain expertise, strong Java and mobile architecture knowledge, and hands on experience building retail-scale systems supporting both in store and digital commerce journeys.
• This is a highly visible leadership role, collaborating across product, security, operations, and business stakeholders globally.

• Payments Architecture & Strategy
• Define and own the end-to-end architecture for payment systems supporting in store POS, mobile apps, and e commerce platforms
• Lead design decisions for payment authorization, capture, settlement, refunds, chargebacks, and reconciliation
• Ensure systems meet PCI DSS, tokenization, encryption, and fraud-prevention requirements
• Evaluate and integrate payment gateways, processors, wallets, and alternative payment methods
• Retail & Digital Commerce Systems
• Design scalable solutions that support high volume retail transactions, promotions, loyalty, and coupons
• Collaborate on solutions spanning POS, e commerce, Mobile, and Enterprise Payment Switch
• Ensure seamless and consistent payment experiences across store, web, and mobile channels

• Act as a hands-on technical leader while mentoring senior engineers and architects
• Drive architecture reviews, technology standards, and best practices
• Lead complex technical discussions and influence decisions across teams and leadership
• Partner with Security, Infrastructure, and SRE teams on resilience and reliability
• Engineering Excellence
• Establish patterns for microservices, event-driven architecture, APIs, and real-time processing
• Drive adoption of cloud-native architectures, observability, and automation
• Participate in critical design and code reviews, especially for high-risk payment components

• 15+ years of software engineering experience with multiple years in an Architect / Principal Engineer role
• Strong hands-on experience designing and building Payment Systems in Retail or E commerce environments
• Proven experience supporting high-volume, low-latency transaction systems
• Technical Expertise
• Deep expertise in Java / JVM-based backend systems (Spring, Microservices, APIs)
• Strong understanding of payment flows, including:
• Card payments, digital wallets, tokenization
• Authorization, capture, settlement, refunds
• Fraud detection and risk controls
• Solid experience designing systems for POS and Store technologies
• Experience integrating with mobile platforms (iOS, Android) and understanding mobile payment flows
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems, scalability, fault tolerance, and data consistency
• Retail & Domain Knowledge
• Strong understanding of Retail operations, including POS, promotions, coupons, loyalty, and receipts
• Experience with E commerce checkout and digital payment journeys
• Familiarity with OMS, loyalty systems, and customer identity in retail is a strong plus

• Experience with cloud platforms (Azure preferred, AWS/GCP acceptable)
• Knowledge of event streaming (Kafka), messaging, and async architectures
• Experience working with global, distributed teams
• Exposure to Digital Receipts, Personalized Offers, and Customer Analytics
• Prior experience modernizing or replacing third-party SaaS payment or POS solutions

• Strong architectural thinking with the ability to balance business needs and technical rigor
• Excellent communication skills; able to explain complex ideas to technical and non technical audiences
• Proven ability to influence without authority and drive alignment across teams
• Passion for engineering excellence, security, and customer experience

Albertsons Companies India