Tech Lead - Terminals

About Ryft   Ryft is a regulated payment facilitator and authorised payment institution building the infrastructure layer for modern commerce platforms. We enable marketplaces, SaaS platforms and multi-party ecosystems to embed and monetise payments natively. Our technology handles onboarding, compliance, orchestration, split payments and revenue sharing, allowing our partners to focus on growth while we manage complexity.   We are now entering the next phase of scale, expanding into new verticals and building a category-defining embedded payments platform.   About the Job Are you an engineering leader who wants to own the systems that connect physical point-of-sale hardware to a modern, scalable payments platform? We are looking for a Tech Lead to head up our Card Present (In-Person Payments) squad. You will lead the technical direction and hands-on delivery of the infrastructure that allows our merchants to take physical payments. You'll work across our C#/.NET backend on AWS, shaping how physical card taps and inserts securely communicate with our event-driven services, split funds, and settle correctly. This is a hands-on, high-impact leadership role. You won't just be managing a Jira board, you'll be deep in the architecture, writing code, mentoring your squad, and owning the technical strategy for our physical terminal estate. You will bridge the gap between cloud infrastructure and physical hardware, ensuring our in-person payment flows are as robust, scalable, and developer-friendly as our online ones. What You'll Work On In-person payments architecture: Leading the technical design for our card-present estate, ensuring low-latency, highly reliable communication between physical terminals and our AWS backend. Terminal & Gateway Integration: Building the critical paths that connect smart payment terminals and Point of Sale (POS) systems into Ryft’s core gateway and marketplace routing logic. Hardware-to-cloud flows: Handling the unique complexities of physical payments: offline modes, state synchronization, hardware webhooks, and complex failure modes. Security & Compliance pipelines: Ensuring our physical payment flows remain airtight and fully compliant within heavily regulated environments. Squad Leadership: Setting the technical standard for the Card Present squad. Breaking down complex product requirements into actionable architecture and guiding engineers through delivery. The platform itself: Contributing to our broader event-driven C#/.NET service estate, infrastructure-as-code, and observability tooling alongside other Tech Leads. Responsibilities Lead technical delivery: Architect, build, and ship end-to-end features for our card-present offering. You are the ultimate technical owner of what your squad ships. Design for hardware-cloud correctness: Write and architect services that behave under network drops, partial failure, and hardware concurrency. Idempotency and absolute accuracy are the job, not edge cases. Raise the bar & mentor: Improve the codebase and our engineering practices. Review code rigorously, set conventions, and level up the engineers in your squad. Own it in production: Take real ownership of what goes live: instrumentation, alerting, and incident response for a system where physical merchants are relying on your uptime to make a living. Harness AI, stay in control: Use AI-assisted workflows to multiply your output (we invest heavily in them) while remaining in full command of every line you ship and review. Collaborate: Work day-to-day with your Engineering Manager, Product Managers, hardware vendors, and other squads to deliver seamless omnichannel payment features. Experience & Skills Required Technical Leadership: Proven experience leading technical projects, architecting complex backend systems, and guiding small teams of engineers to deliver high-quality software. Strong backend engineering: Significant commercial experience building and run