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Expertise

Payments recruitment

Engineers and leaders who have actually run money movement — acquiring, issuing, settlement, reconciliation and scheme integration.

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Payments hiring goes wrong when the recruiter treats it as generic backend engineering. The systems look like ordinary distributed services until you need someone who understands why a settlement file breaks at month end, or what happens to a ledger when an acquirer sends a partial reversal.

We recruit across the full payment value chain — PSPs, processors, acquirers, issuers, card programme managers, orchestration layers, wallets, BaaS providers and cross-border operators.

What we understand about this market

Published so you can assess our domain knowledge before the first call, rather than after it.

  • Acquiring, issuing and the difference in risk, economics and org design between them
  • Card scheme rules, interchange, scheme fees and cost-of-payment modelling
  • Authorisation, capture, clearing and settlement as distinct stages with distinct failure modes
  • Double-entry ledgers, reconciliation breaks and settlement file processing
  • Chargebacks, disputes, representment and the operational teams behind them
  • Payment orchestration, smart routing, cascading and retry logic
  • ISO 8583, ISO 20022, SWIFT, SEPA, Faster Payments, and local rails across the GCC and Southeast Asia
  • Banking APIs, BaaS relationships, safeguarding and client money handling
  • PCI DSS scope, tokenisation and 3-D Secure / SCA exemption logic

What we screen for

The signals that separate candidates who have done the job from candidates who can describe it.

Can they explain the money flow end to end?

A strong payments engineer can walk from authorisation through capture, clearing, settlement and reconciliation without prompting, and can say where the money legally sits at each step.

Have they owned a reconciliation break?

Building a happy-path integration is common. Having been on the hook when the settlement file did not match the ledger is the experience that separates candidates.

Do they know idempotency in a money context?

We probe how they handle duplicate webhooks, partial reversals and retries — the answers reveal whether they have run production payment systems or only integrated a gateway SDK.

Scheme and regulator exposure

Direct experience of scheme certification, PCI audits or regulator reporting is a strong signal for senior payments hires, and we verify it rather than take it from a CV.

Where these hires go wrong

  • Screening payments engineers on generic backend interview loops, which selects for algorithm practice rather than transaction correctness.
  • Treating "payments experience" as one thing — issuing and acquiring backgrounds are not interchangeable.
  • Hiring a Head of Payments for scheme knowledge when the real gap is commercial partnership and banking relationships.
  • Underestimating payment operations. Strong ops hires prevent losses that engineering cannot recover after the fact.

Frequently asked

What payments roles does Hirra recruit for?
We recruit payment engineers, financial infrastructure and banking integration engineers, heads of payments, payment product managers, issuing and acquiring specialists, payment operations, settlement and reconciliation specialists, payment partnerships and treasury roles.
Do you recruit for both issuing and acquiring?
Yes, and we treat them as separate talent markets. Issuing experience centres on card programme management, BIN sponsorship and processor relationships; acquiring centres on merchant onboarding, underwriting, risk and settlement. We screen for the specific side you are hiring into.
Can you help if we are pre-launch and have no payments team yet?
Yes. First payments hires are a common brief. The sequencing usually matters more than the individual profile, so we will talk through whether the first hire should be an engineer, a product owner or a payments operations lead before we start a search.

Hiring a role that generalist recruiters keep getting wrong?

Send us the brief. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right people for it, what the market looks like, and what it will take to hire.

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