Founding Engineer - Payments Infrastructure

Build the decision layer for modern payments - from line one. Payments run on rails built decades apart, stitched together with static routing and single points of failure. Valid transactions fail, merchants overpay, and 'resilience' exists on architecture diagrams but not in production. Zentra is a neutral decision layer for account-to-account (A2A) payments. For every transaction, we evaluate success probability, cost, latency, and policy, then route across multiple providers (Open Banking, SEPA Instant, Faster Payments) and intelligently retry on failure. We don't replace payment providers; we make them perform better.

We're at the beginning, and that's the point. You would be our first engineering hire, working directly with the founders to take a fully specified architecture into production.

Why now

• Design partner secured - a Bank-of-Spain-licensed payment institution with direct Iberpay access, ready to integrate on close of funding.
• Regulatory path confirmed - external legal opinion obtained; no FCA licence required at launch.
• Regulatory tailwind - the EU Instant Payments Regulation is pushing the market directly toward what we're building.
• Pre‑seed round in motion - 18 months of runway on close.

What you'll build

• A routing decision engine making sub-100ms path selections per transaction.
• A connector abstraction layer across A2A providers (TrueLayer, Tink, Volt, Devengo, GoCardless and others).
• Intelligent retry and failover logic with idempotency guarantees.
• An immutable audit trail — every routing decision recorded, explainable, and regulator-ready.
• Monitoring, alerting, and reconciliation designed for a 99.99% availability target.

What we're looking for

• Senior backend engineer (6+ years, or exceptional and hungry) with production experience in payments, banking, or other high‑stakes distributed systems.
• Deep comfort with API‑first architecture, event‑driven systems, and low‑latency services.
• Experience integrating with financial APIs — Open Banking / PSD2, payment gateways, or bank rails is a strong plus.
• You care about correctness: idempotency, reconciliation, and audit trails excite rather than bore you.
• Pragmatic about MVPs but rigorous where it counts — you know which corners can be cut and which never can.
• Comfortable with the ambiguity, ownership, and pace of a pre‑seed startup.

Nice to have

• Hands‑on experience with A2A / Pay‑by‑Bank flows or payment orchestration.
• Familiarity with FCA operational resilience expectations, DORA, or SOC 2 / ISO 27001 environments.
• AWS, infrastructure‑as‑code, and security tooling experience.

What you get

• Founding‑team equity — meaningful ownership, not a token grant.
• Competitive early‑stage salary (funded from close of round; happy to discuss structure openly, including pre‑close contract arrangements).
• Direct influence over architecture, stack, and engineering culture from day one.
• Founders who've done this before: a CEO with a decade of regulatory and financial‑crime leadership across Amazon, Monzo, and Barclays, and a CTO currently accountable for platforms moving £110bn annually.
• A genuinely hard, genuinely valuable problem — trust infrastructure for how money moves.

How to apply

Apply through LinkedIn M or send a short note to sumaiyah@zentra.cx with a line or two on the most interesting payments or distributed‑systems problem you've solved. No cover letter needed — we'd rather see your thinking. Zentra is an equal opportunity employer. We're building infrastructure for everyone, and we hire that way too.