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Salary: USD 222,256 - 259,324 / annual
Plug is an automotive fintech startup building a marketplace for used electric vehicles. Founded in 2023 by former Tesla executives and backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners ($20M Series A), the company has facilitated $100M in EV sales and is positioned to scale significantly.
You will own the architecture for Plug's money-facing systems—ledger, payment disbursement, settlement, reconciliation, and lien/title payoff processing. This is a technical architect role focused exclusively on financial infrastructure, not consumer-facing product. Every transaction on Plug moves real money, and current systems were built for $100M volume; you'll design the architecture to support $1B+ scale.
Key responsibilities:
- Design a deterministic, auditable ledger that serves as a single source of truth for every dollar moving through the platform
- Architect systems integrating with banking partners, payment processors, and lien/title servicers within regulatory and compliance constraints
- Document core technical tradeoffs for financial systems: consistency vs. availability, idempotency, fault tolerance, and failure recovery
- Partner with Product, Risk, Finance, and Compliance to translate business and regulatory requirements into system design
- Set technical standards and act as final technical guardrail for any system touching money
- Mentor engineers in the money systems domain without formal people management
- Evaluate build vs. integrate decisions for payments and banking infrastructure
- Work with AI coding agents, defining acceptance criteria and reviewing AI-generated output for code that moves money
Plug emphasizes that building money-facing architecture is fundamentally different from consumer-facing product architecture and requires distinct expertise. You'll have high autonomy, real ownership, and direct visibility to company outcomes. The company is building an AI-native team in Los Angeles with operators who have scaled multi-billion-dollar businesses.
Requirements:
- 10+ years in software engineering, with 5+ years on B2B and B2C payments solutions
- Direct experience designing and building payments, ledger, lending, or money movement infrastructure (not just consumer-facing payment systems)
- Proven ability to design within regulatory and banking-partner constraints elegantly, avoiding technical debt accumulation
- Experience designing systems within regulatory and banking-partner constraints; understanding what banks, processors, and regulators require
- Deep expertise in distributed systems: transaction integrity, financial data consistency, idempotency, auditability, and fault tolerance at scale
- Track record of owning architecture decisions end-to-end from design through implementation and long-term maintainability
- High agency in ambiguous, fast-moving startup environments; comfort being the first and primary technical owner of a domain
- Strong cross-functional collaboration skills; ability to translate complex technical tradeoffs for non-technical stakeholders
- Comfort orchestrating multiple coding agents, defining clear acceptance criteria, and reviewing AI-generated output to a high bar
- Plus: international or cross-border money movement experience
- Plus: experience with title, lien, lending, or marketplace escrow-like flows
