Senior Software Engineer

The posting, as Kunai wrote it

Kunai builds full-stack technology solutions for banks, credit and payment networks, infrastructure providers, and their customers. Together, we are changing the world’s relationship with financial services. At Kunai, we help our clients modernize, capitalize on emerging trends, and evolve their business for the coming decades by remaining tech-agnostic and human-centered.

We are building a team of Senior Software Engineers to join a high-impact digital payments modernization program supporting the integration of a major card network into one of the largest financial institutions in the United States. This is a hands-on engineering role at the intersection of legacy and modern infrastructure, where you will contribute to both the reliability of mission-critical payment systems today and help shape the architecture that will power them tomorrow.

Some things you may work on

You will be embedded across one or more workstreams supporting digital payments engineering, with responsibilities that may include:

Domain & Service Architecture

• Apply domain-driven design to define bounded contexts, domain models, and aggregate boundaries for card-network reference data — establishing a ubiquitous language shared across engineering and business stakeholders.
• Develop and harden a Spring Boot / JPA / PostgreSQL Aurora service with Liquibase-managed schema migrations, a Drools-based business rules engine, and scheduled batch jobs — including designing authorization and data-access controls from the ground up where none exist today.
• Design and own integration workflows and routing using Apache Camel (or equivalent), orchestrating multi-step, stateful operations such as request intake, validation, approval, and publication pipelines.
• Develop an event-driven backbone using Kafka — topic/schema design, producer/consumer reliability patterns, and integration with the rules engine and workflow layer.

Frontend & Identity

• Develop a micro-frontend application (Next.js/React/TypeScript) as an independently deployable system, and design its convergence path into the card network's future shared micro-frontend shell.
• Own the OAuth2/OIDC identity architecture end-to-end — provider integration (Okta), JWT/token validation strategy, session/revocation design, and trust-boundary decisions across environments.

Cloud & Platform

• Design and govern AWS IAM policy, S3, and CloudFront architecture across multiple environments — this is not config-following; you're expected to set the standard.
• Lead deployment on the organization's internal static cloud hosting platform.
• Drive test-driven development practice across the team and build out continuous testing/automation pipelines (unit, contract, integration, and end-to-end) as part of CI/CD.

Scalability, Performance Testing & Validation

• Design and execute enterprise-grade performance testing strategies for payment processing services, defining frameworks, tooling, and success criteria from the gr

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g/automation pipelines (unit, contract, integration, and end-to-end) as part of CI/CD.

Payments & Financial Services

• Background in digital payments, card processing, or financial services technology strongly preferred.
• Understanding of PCI compliance requirements and secure data handling practices.
• Familiarity with event-driven architecture patterns and OpenShift-based eventing.

Collaboration & Communication

• Demonstrated ability to work effectively in large, matrixed program environments with multiple teams and stakeholders.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills; able to translate technical complexity for non-technical audiences.
• Comfortable operating in environments with evolving requirements and ambiguity.

NICE TO HAVE

• Experience with PGLogical or PostgreSQL logical replication.
• Exposure to AI-assisted development tools (GitHub Copilot or Claude).
• Prior work on bank or card network integration programs.
• Experience working in segregated or air-gapped development environments.

At this time we are unable to provide sponsorship for this role.

Our success over the past 20 years is rooted in our exceptional team, which thrives in a culture of collaboration, creativity, and continuous learning.

We are proud to offer our employees a range of benefits, including competitive compensation, professional development opportunities, and flexible work arrangements, all designed to help them thrive. As we continue to expand, we remain committed to cultivating an environment where people feel valued, have a voice, and are given the tools to grow—both personally and professionally—while pushing the boundaries of innovation in the fintech industry.

Minimum Degree Required

• Bachelor’s Degree, in lieu of a degree, demonstrating in addition to the minimum years of experience required for the role, three years of specialized training and/or progressively responsible work experience in technology for each missing year of college is required