Engineering & Technology - Engineering
Software Engineer - Fraud, Payments
IC / Practitioner
Independently auditedBuilds and operates the software the business runs on. Owns a defined area of the function and the outcomes it produces.
Audited package
Built, independently audited role package. Everything on this page is written for this seat.
Your Stack (Swappable)
This role works against whatever tools you already run. We list the tool categories the role operates in, never a named vendor, so you are never asked to replace a system that works.
- AI / LLM Platform
- Processor and tokenization
- Fraud decisioning
- Ledger and reconciliation
- Events and workflow
- Review and case tooling
- Observability & Monitoring
- Source and delivery
Deliverables
- Design documents
- Review checklists
- Technical standards
- Delivery and sequencing plans
Responsibilities
- Design and operate payment-intent, authorization, authentication or challenge, capture, void, refund, and dispute state machines.
- Make charge, capture, refund, webhook, and queue effects idempotent under client retry, provider retry, duplicate delivery, and partial failure.
- Integrate processor, tokenization, ledger, settlement, billing, and customer-status systems through explicit versioned contracts.
- Build fraud scoring, rule evaluation, velocity limits, graph or behavioral signals, allow, challenge, block, and review decisions.
- Instrument approval, decline, challenge, fraud loss, false positive, processor error, reconciliation, refund, and dispute outcomes.
- Create audit-grade event lineage and reason codes for every payment and fraud decision without exposing protected model or customer data.
- Reconcile application, processor, ledger, settlement, refund, chargeback, and accounting records and classify discrepancies.
- Investigate duplicate charge, lost capture, replay, fraud ring, account takeover, processor outage, rule misfire, and reconciliation incidents.
The essence of this seat
The Software Engineer - Fraud, Payments is the engineer who builds payment authorization, capture, refund, dispute, and fraud-decision systems where every state transition can move money and adversaries actively probe the edges.
Signature move
Draw the payment state machine. Map intent, authorization, challenge, capture, settlement, void, refund, dispute, failure, retry, and terminal states before editing code
What good looks like
turns retry ambiguity into one durable business effect
Decision rights
- - - The implementation and verification of payment authorization, capture, void, refund, dispute, retry, and fraud-decision workflows within approved product and risk policy
Working vocabulary
What this role does
The Software Engineer - Fraud, Payments is the engineer who builds payment authorization, capture, refund, dispute, and fraud-decision systems where every state transition can move money and adversaries actively probe the edges. The role's domain is payment state machines, idempotent charge and refund flows, fraud scoring and rules, velocity controls, chargebacks, reconciliation, PCI-sensitive data handling, and audit-grade event lineage. Its core outcome is a legitimate payment completes exactly once, a suspicious payment is challenged or blocked with explainable evidence, and every financial effect reconciles from request through processor, ledger, refund, and dispute. This is a standalone 1:1 role package. It represents only the Software Engineer - Fraud, Payments title. A generic Software Engineer package does not replace it, and this package does not replace any neighboring domain, layer, platform, or level title. The differentiation must remain visible in the role's metrics, artifacts, failure modes, operating protocols, stakeholders, interview loop, and Golden Q&A. The altitude and seams are explicit. The Money Infrastructure Engineer owns the ledger, settlement, payout, and money-movement primitives beneath the flow, while this seat owns payment flow orchestration, fraud and risk decisions, and customer-facing charge or refund behavior. The Backend Engineer owns general server-side application behavior without this financial and adversarial mandate, while this seat owns adversarial, audited money-moving behavior with explicit reconciliation and risk controls. The Fraud Operations / Risk Policy defines fraud policy, adjudicates cases, and accepts fraud or false-positive risk, while this seat builds decision systems, evidence, controls, and review workflows. Two mental models should be visible in every decision: Every payment is a state machine and Exactly once is an effect, not a transport guarantee. The work is strong only when those models appear in the evidence rather than remaining vocabulary.
Best-fit customer
engineering teams that want consistent judgement applied to design, review, and delivery
Need more than one role?
Buying the whole team or the complete department lowers your effective cost per role at every tier of the ladder.