Solution Architect

## Job Description Summary

Solution Architects on the Genius Point of Sale (POS) team at Global Payments own the technical outcomes for one or more POS platforms, while actively contributing to the convergence of each into a shared architecture ecosystem. This role sits at the intersection of payments, commerce, and developer experience, and contributes directly to how AI-enabled capabilities are embedded into merchant-facing products and internal tooling. This is a deeply embedded, delivery-oriented role.

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## Summary of This Role

This role works directly with product and engineering teams to design and guide the architecture of cloud-native POS systems, payment integrations, and third-party partner ecosystems. The focus is helping teams make good technical decisions quickly, anchoring designs in real-world constraints, NFRs, security, and scalability, and driving cross-domain interoperability so capabilities built in one platform can be shared across the broader organization.

A core expectation is leading how Genius POS teams build and adopt AI tooling, from chatbots and agentic workflows to AI-assisted development practices.

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## What Part Will You Play?

- **Embedded architecture ownership:** Participates in sprint ceremonies, roadmap planning, and trade-off conversations as a first-class member of the delivery team.
- **Payment and integration design:** Leads architecture for payment flows (card-present, card-not-present, semi-integrated, P2PE, tokenization, surcharge/cash discount) and for the integration ecosystem connecting POS platforms to third-party loyalty, delivery, gift, payroll, and fiscal providers.
- **Convergence through interoperability:** Designs APIs and contracts that enable the POS platforms to share capabilities without forced disruption. Treats every design as an opportunity for cross-platform reuse until proven otherwise.
- **Unified integration platform:** Contributes to the architecture of a shared integration fabric, including partner onboarding, API management, authentication, schema translation, and shared service design.
- **AI-enabled solutions:** Designs and contributes to AI-integrated product features: chatbot orchestration, agentic workflows using MCP tooling, operator-facing AI assistants, and RAG-backed analytics. Evaluates and champions AI tools that accelerate team delivery.
- **NFR ownership:** Owns security, scalability, observability, and compliance requirements as first-class design inputs, not retrofit work at the end of a cycle.
- **Technical governance without gatekeeping:** Integrates governance into design so that architecture reviews become a byproduct of good work, not a late-stage blocker.
- **Cross-team enablement:** Represents the POS domain in cross-functional architecture forums. Documents decisions and their rationale. Helps less-senior engineers grow their architectural instincts.

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## What Are We Looking For?

### Minimum Qualifications

- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
- 6+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 3 years in a solution architect, lead engineer, or principal engineer capacity
- Demonstrated experience designing and shipping payment integrations: card-present, gateway integrations, semi-integrated payment flows, tokenization, or PCI-scoped architectures
- Hands-on experience building or operating cloud-native systems on AWS or Azure (microservices, event-driven architecture, API design)
- Strong API design skills across REST and OpenAPI, including authentication/authorization patterns (OAuth 2.0, API key lifecycle)
- Experience integrating third-party platforms and designing scalable integration patterns (adapters, SPIs, provider-agnostic contracts)

### Preferred Qualifications

- Experience with point-of-sale systems or commerce platforms
- Familiarity with payment gateway ecosystems
- Experience designing or working with unified integration platforms, API gateways (Apigee, Kong, AWS API Gateway), or developer portals
- Experience building or architecting AI-enabled features: chatbot/conversational AI, RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, LLM tool use (function calling, MCP), or AI-assisted developer tooling
- Experience working across verticals (SMB, mid-market, enterprise) and understanding the architectural tradeoffs each requires

## Desired Skills and Capabilities

### Technical

- **Cloud platforms:** AWS (ECS/Fargate, EKS, Lambda, SQS/SNS, Aurora, S3, CloudWatch) and/or Azure (App Services, AKS, Service Bus, Cosmos DB)
- **Backend:** Java, .NET, Node.js, PHP, Go, or comparable; comfortable reading and reviewing across stacks
- **Data:** Relational (MySQL/PostgreSQL/Aurora), caching (Redis), search (OpenSearch/Elasticsearch), big data pipelines (BigQuery, Athena, S3-based lakes)
- **Messaging / events:** Kafka, SQS/SNS, or comparable event-driven architectures
- **Mobile platforms:** Familiarity with iOS, Android, or React Native in the context of commerce client applications
- **IaC and CI/CD:** Terraform, GitHub Actions, Harness, or equivalent
- **AI/ML:** Practical experience with foundation model APIs (AWS Bedrock, OpenAI, GCP Vertex), prompt engineering, RAG patterns, agent frameworks, or MCP tooling

### Payments and Compliance

- Working knowledge of PCI DSS scope management and semi-integrated payment architectures
- Familiarity with P2PE, tokenization, and secure card data handling
- Understanding of payment tender types: credit/debit, gift card, BNPL, ACH, and alternative payment methods

### Soft Skills and Ways of Working

* **Skills / Knowledge:** Having wide-ranging experience, uses professional concepts and company objectives to resolve complex issues in creative and effective ways.
* **Job Complexity:** Works on complex issues where analysis of situations or data requires an in-depth evaluation of variable factors. Exercises judgment in selecting methods, techniques and evaluation criteria for obtaining results. Networks with key contacts outside own area of expertise.
* **Supervision:** Determines methods and procedures on new assignments and may coordinate activities of other personnel.

- **Action over artifacts:** Ships solutions, not documents. Diagrams exist to align teams, not to substitute for delivery. Value is measured by what teams build and ship, not by the elegance of designs in isolation.
- **Bias toward decisions:** Makes the call when teams are stuck, documents the why and the risks.
- **Shared mindset:** Before approving a net-new build, the first question is whether a peer domain already solved it or also has value in it.
- **Communicates across levels:** Equally comfortable in an engineering design review and a product conversation about tradeoffs.

### Tooling

- **Project and delivery management:** Jira, Confluence
- **Architecture and diagramming:** Lucidchart, Miro, draw.io, or comparable
- **API design and documentation:** Swagger/OpenAPI, Postman, Apigee, or comparable
- **Observability:** Datadog, CloudWatch, or comparable APM/logging platforms

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## The Work You'll Join

Global Payments is one of the world's largest pure-play payment technology companies, processing billions of transactions annually across more than 170 countries. Genius POS is Global Payments' suite of merchant point-of-sale platforms, spanning many product lines across several verticals. Solution Architects on this team sit at the intersection of payments infrastructure and POS commerce, with direct access to Global Payments' processing network, gateway platform, and international payment capabilities.

The Genius POS architecture team is driving a common technology strategy across these platforms, including shared integration infrastructure, a converging payments architecture, and AI-enabled product capabilities. Initiatives include:

- **Unified Integration Platform:** Architecture that gives each POS platform production-grade API management, partner lifecycle management, and a shared service layer for high-effort integrations.
- **AI Chatbot and Agentic Workflows:** An operator-facing AI assistant that evolves from read-only conversational analytics to write-enabled agentic operations against POS systems of record, powered MCP tooling and POS API integrations.
- **Consistent Payments:** A shared payments decision framework and roadmap across each POS platform, covering when to use each payment flow, and driving PCI scope reduction through semi-integrated architecture.
- **Shared Services:** Designing reusable capabilities that can be built and owned once and consumed across each POS platform.