Senior Product Engineer - Payments Team

Hi! 👋 I'm Ismayil, Engineering Manager for Team Payments at WeTravel.

I joined WeTravel to help simplify how group travel businesses handle payments and bookings. Having worked across various tech roles from startups to universities, I'm passionate about building reliable systems that solve real operational challenges. Our Payments team ensures that thousands of travel organizers can collect payments, manage installment plans, and pay suppliers seamlessly every month. We process 150K+ payments each month! As we expand our payment capabilities with localized payment methods and language support for new markets, I'm looking for engineers who are excited about making complex financial transactions feel simple for our global users.

Think of the most incredible adventures imaginable: trekking to Machu Picchu, cycling through Tuscany, or going on a safari in Kenya. For years, the small businesses and local experts who run these trips have been stuck using messy spreadsheets, countless emails, and complicated payment methods.

WeTravel is changing that. We build the tools that empower any entrepreneur to launch and grow their own travel business. Our platform makes it simple for organizers to create beautiful trip proposals, securely process payments, and manage their customers, so they can focus on what they do best: creating amazing experiences.

This is one of the last great frontiers of travel to come online, and as the category leader, we are at the forefront of this change. Last year alone, our platform was trusted by 8,000 organizers to lead over a million travelers on adventures in 150+ countries. Now, we’re on an exciting journey to grow from powering $1B to $10B in travel experiences per year.

We believe that every trip, when done right, can be a force for good - and we’re building the engine to make more of that possible.

You will join the Payments team to lead critical projects across collection, disbursement, FX, reconciliation, and a new card issuing stack. Upcoming work includes:

• New payment method expansion: doubling our payment methods next 12 months, with focus on local digital methods (UPI, PIX, account-to-account rails) in priority markets.

• Card issuing: building a card issuing capability in dozens of geographies, including the ledger, authorization flows, controls, and operational tooling around it.

• Reliability and structural improvements: scaling our payment processing capability to reach 10x growth.

• Multi-currency and FX: Broadening our conversion engine and global reach across more than 20 currencies.

What you’ll do day-to-day:

• Lead payments projects end-to-end: discovery with Product and PayOps teams, integration design with PSPs, build, rollout, monitoring, and incident response.

• Partner with the Product team to gain insight into organizer and traveler challenges, building payment solutions that successfully process transactions.

• Own the reliability of our payments system

• Contribute to WeTravel’s engineering practices and excellence.

• We’re focused on the impact. We don’t subscribe to any one framework or execution ideology, and we adapt based on what’s impactful.

• We’re using the latest hardware and constantly on the look out for better tools & ways to work.

• We have AI-first development experience and work with the latest models and agentic dev tools.

• Stack: We’re developing React/TypeScript, Ruby on Rails and Kotlin Microservices. Our services run on Kubernetes. We also use and love MongoDB, MySQL, Postgres, Snowflake and we’re working with the major LLM providers.

Basic qualifications:

• 7+ years of product engineering expertise, with 4+ years dedicated to architecting complex payments systems.

• Proven track record within a PSP, acquirer, gateway, or a high-scale platform payments team.

• Broad practical expertise in deploying and troubleshooting production-level integrations across various PSPs, card acquirer ecosystems, and diverse payment rails. You possess deeply ingrained expertise in settlement processes, reconciliation, dispute management, 3DS2 protocols, high-pressure webhook management, and PCI compliance frameworks, including tokenization methods.

• Strong backend mastery in Ruby on Rails, Kotlin, Python, Go, Java, or Node.js with the agility to ramp up on Ruby quickly.

• Full-stack comfort: you can build the React interface for the payment flows you architect.

• Deep expertise in architecting robust, resilient distributed systems, including double-entry ledgers, automated reconciliation pipelines, money movement state machines, idempotency, exactly-once semantics, event-driven architectures, webhooks, and reliable consumer patterns.

• Direct production on-call experience, including authoring post-mortems and leading incident response.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including cross-functional collaboration experience, and the ability to thrive in a distributed, multicultural environment.

• Pragmatic adoption of AI tools to optimize your engineering workflow, including the ability to mentor and train others on AI concepts.

Technical Skills

• Strong background in cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), containerization, and modern CI/CD practices.

• Experience in handling critical systems with precision: you will handle FX and multi-currency logic directly within the application layer.

• Bonus: Direct card issuing experience, including BIN sponsorship, processor integrations, controls, and dispute handling.

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience launching a new payment method or PSP integration end-to-end.

• Experience building or operating a card issuing program.

• Experience in marketplace or two-sided platform payments (split payments, payouts, escrow-like flows).

• Your payments expertise is limited to high-level integrations like Stripe Checkout. We need someone who operates deeply beneath that abstraction layer.

• You are hesitant to take full ownership of mission-critical money movement or participate in the on-call rotation when systems fail.

• You prioritize greenfield development over the complex challenge of scaling and refining an existing system with significant transaction volume.

• You are looking for a siloed IC position without the need for cross-functional collaboration or product-level discovery.

• You require a rigid, pre-defined roadmap; we prefer to sharpen our strategy and direction as we scale the team.

• Solve real payments problems at real volume: billions of dollars of transaction volume, 21 currencies, 14 integrations and growing.

• Make a real impact: you’ll help build the operating system for the multi-day group travel industry, empowering thousands of organizers and millions of travelers worldwide.

• Solve meaningful technical challenges at scale, from designing robust systems to improving real-time user experiences in a complex domain.

• Be part of building the best engineering team: you’ll help shape culture, mentor others, and contribute to high standards of excellence and collaboration.

• Enjoy flexibility and balance, with competitive compensation, generous PTO, and remote-friendly work culture.

• Competitive salary

• Generous "Time to Recharge" policy - enjoy unlimited paid time off to rest, recharge, and show up as your best self.

• Our Work From Anywhere perk provides eligible employees with up to four weeks per calendar year to work temporarily from another approved location.

• 2-week cross-functional onboarding program.

• Annual team off-site (often somewhere sunny 🌊).

• Cycle-to-work scheme (Swapfiets subscription) or commuting reimbursement.

• Monday/Thursday team lunches and after-work social events.

• Extensive paid family leave.

• Three paid volunteer days per year - take time to give back to causes you care about, on us.

• Cutting-edge equipment and tools to set you up for success.

• Join an international, travel-loving team with a passion for adventure and innovation.

WeTravel is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. If you're excited about this opportunity and believe you're a good fit, we encourage you to apply and join us in transforming the travel industry!