Principal Architect – Money and Payments R&D

About the role

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is seeking a Principal Architect to lead research and development of next‑generation money and payment systems. This senior position combines deep technical leadership with the opportunity to shape public‑sector fintech innovation.

Key responsibilities

• Architect high‑throughput distributed payment platforms capable of 100K+ transactions per second with strong consistency.
• Design and implement EVM‑compatible virtual machine infrastructure with parallel execution.
• Develop production‑grade Solidity smart contracts for settlement, orchestration, and atomic cross‑service composition.
• Build cryptographic protocols, including zero‑knowledge proofs, for privacy‑preserving validation.
• Lead cloud‑native platform design, ensuring multi‑region resilience, horizontal scalability, and Kubernetes‑based orchestration.
• Implement GitOps workflows (ArgoCD, Flux) and Infrastructure‑as‑Code using Terraform or Pulumi.
• Create CI/CD pipelines with automated testing, security scanning, and zero‑downtime deployments.
• Define observability strategies using distributed tracing, metrics, and real‑time alerting.
• Translate payment challenges into AI‑native solutions for autonomous orchestration, fraud detection, and intelligent routing.

Required profile

• Proven senior technical leadership in large‑scale payment or fintech systems.
• Strong background in distributed systems, cryptography, and smart‑contract development.
• Experience delivering cloud‑native, multi‑region architectures at scale.
• Ability to work onsite in Boston, San Francisco, or Dallas and collaborate with interdisciplinary teams.

Required skills

• Solidity
• EVM
• Zero‑knowledge proofs
• Cryptography
• Kubernetes
• ArgoCD
• Flux
• Terraform
• Pulumi
• CI/CD pipelines
• Distributed tracing
• Metrics and observability
• AI and machine learning

What we offer

• Opportunity to influence the future of national money and payments.
• Startup‑like environment within a world‑class public institution.
• Comprehensive benefits and professional development resources.