Solutions Architect

InterPayments Inc. is a San Francisco, CA-based SaaS company sitting at the exciting intersection of payments and data intelligence. Our mission is to empower merchants and the software vendors they use to manage their cost of accepting payments. We create innovative data services that Fortune 1000 companies rely upon to lower fees by putting payments in competition on every swipe.

We empower dedicated team-first individuals who are driven to solve problems to foster innovation, perform at their highest potential, and make a meaningful impact – while creating meaningful relationships along the way.

Role and Purpose

This position will report to the Manager of Solutions Architecture. It will be home office based and may require up to 5% travel (primarily for InterPayments and Partner events).

This role is both customer-facing and deeply technical in equal measure. You’ll win in two very different rooms with both new prospects and existing customers. Commercially, you’ll articulate our value and the level of effort required to achieve it to stakeholders whose incentives and technical acumen vary widely. This includes executive sponsors and procurement to finance and operations leaders. Technically, you carry enough depth to lower the barriers to trust with high-acumen engineering, developer, and IT teams who won't accept a recommendation on faith. You will help both new and existing customers understand the value of our services, how they implement them, and the level of effort to do so in a way that builds and maintains trust. You will creatively craft and present the architecture of how InterPayments fits inside a customer's payment stack. You’ll also make the commercial case, alongside our sales and partnership teams, for the architecture, our value, and the effort to realize our value.

You determine where InterPayments lives in a customer's payment flow. Enterprise customers arrive with a payment stack already in motion, and surcharging reaches further into it than they expect. Your job is to understand that stack in detail, decide precisely where our solutions must fit, and specify the changes required to put it there compliantly. To do this, you'll trace transaction flows, design integration patterns, produce payment workflow diagrams and written specifications, review designs, and walk customer development teams through your recommendations. You work the technical side of an engagement from the first architecture conversation through a signed design, hand a documented design to Implementations, and stay accountable through go-live.

You go deep, not just wide; you investigate, then commit. From a technical perspective, a high-level understanding of a payment flow is where you start, not where you stop. You want to know what the system is actually doing – which call fires first, what the payload contains, where the amount is mutated, when the token is created, and what happens on a partial capture or a refund. From a commercial perspective, you’ll understand the needs, incentives, and constraints of the customer’s commercial and technical teams to arrive at the best answer to achieve the customer’s goals. You do the work to understand the root cause and align that with the customer’s goal before you express a view.

How you'll make an impact

Tracing customer payment flows: Map a customer's existing transaction flow end to end – checkout through authorization, capture, settlement, and reconciliation – and pinpoint the insertion point for surcharge calculation, disclosure, and reporting.

Producing architecture diagrams and flow documentation: Every enterprise engagement ships with current system and sequence diagrams showing system boundaries, call order, data ownership, and integration points. You guide the customer's and partner's own technical teams in producing this documentation, stepping in to build it yourself when needed. Where patterns repeat, you turn them into reference architectures the team reuses.

Writing prescriptive integration specifications: Specify the changes a customer must make – which endpoints to call, in what order, with what data, and what to change in their existing implementation – along with the tradeoffs and your reasoning. Genuine product gaps you surface go to Product with a technical case specific enough to act on.

Leading technical conversations with customer engineering teams: Run architecture reviews and integration working sessions with customer developers, architects, and their gateway or platform vendors.

Requirements

5+ years in a technical, customer-facing payments role, including at least 3 years personally owning the technical design of enterprise payment integrations end to end.

Fluency in the payment transaction lifecycle – authorization, capture (including partial and delayed), void, refund, settlement, and reconciliation into accounting systems/ERPs

Direct experience at, or integrating deeply with, a payment gateway, acquirer, or payment orchestration platform.

Ability to read and reason about API documentation, request/response payloads, and transaction logs on your own, including enough scripting ability to prototype an API call or parse a log file yourself. You should be able to look at a customer's workflows and API calls and tell them what will happen.

Proven ability to produce professional architecture and sequence diagrams.

Experience presenting an integration design to a non-technical executive audience and getting a decision out of the room.

Nice to Have's

Experience with ERPs, Accounting Systems of Record, Accounts Receivable Automation platforms, and vertical SaaS platforms .

Experience working with card present payment solutions

Experience working with enterprise companies in the following verticals: B2B wholesale distribution, transportation and logistics, professional services of all types, government and utilities, or education.

Who you are

You strive to uncover complex problems and find great personal and professional fulfillment in solving them. You can put yourself into the mindset of a customer to uncover problems before an actual customer does. In addition, you are:

Team-oriented: You believe shared success and individual advancement go hand-in-hand. We share values. You thrive in an inclusive, collaborative environment and hold yourself and your teammates accountable. You step up and step in when your team needs you.

Impact-driven: You find deep meaning and satisfaction in making an impact. You are self-aware about what motivates you and what instills passion. You take pride in being trusted to deliver results for your team. You embrace a growth-mindset. You reframe setbacks as gifted opportunities to improve. In short, you're a polite, ethical go-getter.

Structured decision maker: You believe progress is rooted in a focused effort. To know how to focus, you work hard to understand the root cause and listen to different points of view. You prefer investigating to being right. You first identify the core drivers of a problem and work backwards to simplify the solution. You constantly think about 2nd and 3rd order effects of decisions. In general, you are optimistically paranoid about what you don't know.

InterPayments' Values

Customers and mission first. The customer is at the heart of everything we do and we have an enormous obligation to help them. We align our company, team, and individual goals with customer outcomes and our mission. When making decisions and setting priorities, we always keep our customer's perspective and our mission in mind.

Always build trust. We focus on the long-term. We treat everyone - existing and prospective teammates, customers, partners, vendors, investors - as if we'll know and work with them forever. We assume good intent and empathize. We're always ethical, respectful, and honest. We are responsive, reliable, and trustworthy. We are loyal and committed to one another, our customers, and our mission. Nothing is transactional.

Do the hard(er) thing. We reject complacency and embody a growth mindset because it's more fulfilling. Being resilient, flexible, and adaptable is challenging. Seeking and delivering honest feedback is hard. Embracing open-mindedness, intellectual honesty, and respectful disagreement is tough. Being relentlessly curious, simplifying complexity, and thinking through 2nd/3rd order effects of decisions takes more work. Being highly responsive and making data-driven decisions requires more effort. We choose to do them anyway. We find reward in pushing ourselves and others beyond our comfort zones.