Payments Recruitment | Hire Payment Engineers

01

Money movement

Issuing
Authorisation
Capture
Clearing
Ledger
Settlement
Reconciliation

We screen against every stage. Most candidates can describe two or three.

Payments hiring fails when it is treated as generic backend engineering — until you need someone who knows why a settlement file breaks at month end. We recruit across the full value chain.

02

What we understand

Acquiring vs issuing
Scheme rules & interchange
Auth, capture, clearing, settlement
Double-entry ledgers
Reconciliation breaks
Chargebacks & disputes
Payment orchestration
ISO 8583 / ISO 20022
SEPA, Faster Payments, GCC rails
Banking APIs & BaaS
Safeguarding & client money
PCI DSS, tokenisation, 3DS

03

What we screen for

Can they trace the money end to end?

A strong payments engineer walks from authorisation through settlement and reconciliation unprompted, and can say where the money legally sits at each step.

Have they owned a reconciliation break?

Building a happy-path integration is common. Being on the hook when the settlement file did not match the ledger is what separates candidates.

Do they know idempotency in a money context?

How they handle duplicate webhooks, partial reversals and retries reveals 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 hires. We verify it rather than take it from a CV.

04

Where these hires go wrong

Screening on generic backend loops, which selects for algorithm...

Screening on generic backend loops, which selects for algorithm practice over transaction correctness.

Treating "payments experience" as one thing — issuing and...

Treating "payments experience" as one thing — issuing and acquiring are not interchangeable.

Hiring a Head of Payments for scheme knowledge when the gap is...

Hiring a Head of Payments for scheme knowledge when the gap is banking relationships.

Underestimating payment operations, which prevents losses...

Underestimating payment operations, which prevents losses engineering cannot recover.

FAQ

Frequently asked

What payments roles does Hirra recruit?

Payment engineers, financial infrastructure and banking integration engineers, heads of payments, payment product managers, issuing and acquiring specialists, payment operations, settlement and reconciliation, partnerships and treasury.

Do you recruit for both issuing and acquiring?

Yes, and we treat them as separate talent markets. Issuing centres on card programme management, BIN sponsorship and processor relationships; acquiring on merchant onboarding, underwriting, risk and settlement. We screen for the side you are hiring into.

Can you help pre-launch, with no payments team yet?

Yes. First payments hires are a common brief. 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 an operations lead before starting a search.