Vice President Software Engineering

Job Description

About FIS

FIS is a leading provider of technology solutions for financial institutions and businesses of all sizes and across all industries — in the world. We empower the financial world by enabling the movement of money, processing trillions of dollars annually, and powering thousands of banks, capital markets firms, and merchants globally. Our Technology organization is the engine behind that mission, building the platforms, infrastructure, and digital experiences that move the global economy forward.

Position Summary

The Vice President, Head of Money Movement engineering is a senior executive within the FIS Technology organization, accountable for leading the product development of money movement, including a wide range of solutions, such as ACH, FedNow, real-time payments, instant payments, retail payments, commercial payments, and cross-border payments. This leader will set technical strategy and direction for money movement, modernize product delivery and architecture, scale product and solution for growth, and ensure high availability, observability, resiliency and recovery. This leader will partner closely with technology, business, product, and operation leaders to build and lead a high-performing organization of engineers and technical leaders.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership

• Define and own the multi-year technical roadmap for payments and money movement systems — including rails (ACH, RTP, SWIFT, FedNow, Open Payment Framework), ledgering, and reconciliation platforms.
• Architect systems for high availability, fault tolerance, and near-zero downtime — because payment failures have direct revenue and trust consequences.
• Drive engineering standards across idempotency, exactly once delivery, auditability, and financial data integrity.

Payments Domain Expertise (non-negotiable)

• Deep, hands-on fluency in payment rails — ACH, Fedwire, RTP/FedNow, SEPA, SWIFT, card networks (Visa/MC), and emerging real-time rails.
• Strong understanding of settlement cycles, float, nostro/vostro accounts, and reconciliation at scale.
• Experience navigating card scheme rules, interchange, dispute/chargeback flows, and network compliance.
• Familiarity with PSPs, issuing/acquiring processors, BaaS partners, and correspondent banking relationships.
• Working knowledge of PCI-DSS, SOC 1/2, AML/KYC obligations, and how they constrain system design.

People & Organization

• Lead and scale an organization of 400+ engineers across multiple squads (e.g., core rails, ledger, fraud & risk, reconciliation, partner integrations).
• Recruit, develop, and retain senior/staff/principal engineers and engineering managers.
• Build a culture of operational excellence, incident ownership, and continuous improvement.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Work tightly with Product, Finance, Risk, Compliance, Legal, and Treasury on payment product strategy and regulatory posture.
• Partner with enterprise technology teams on enterprise platform implementation, application resiliency, observability, and recovery standards.

Reliability & Operations

• Own SLAs for payment success rates, latency, and settlement accuracy — typically 99.99%+ uptime expectations.
• Lead major incident response for payment failures; drive blameless post-mortems and systemic fixes.
• Build observability and alerting stacks tailored to financial transaction monitoring.

Stakeholder & Executive Engagement

• Represent the Technology organization in executive forums, steering committees, and board-level reporting on strategic programs.

Required Qualifications

• 15+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years in payments or financial services infrastructure.
• 5+ years leading large engineering organizations (managers of managers)
• Demonstrated, specific money movement domain knowledge — candidates without this are screened out at the first round.
• Experience scaling payments systems to high throughput with strict consistency and durability requirements.
• Track record of delivering complex, multi-year engineering programs on time
• Strong communication skills — able to translate technical risk into business impact for C-suite and board audiences.
• Proven ability to operate at the executive level — directly advising C-suite leaders, presenting to boards, and influencing across functional boundaries.
• Strong command of modern delivery methodologies (Agile, SAFe, Lean, hybrid) and portfolio management practices and tooling (e.g., Jira Align, Clarity, Planview, ServiceNow SPM).
• Exceptional written, verbal, and executive communication skills; able to distill complexity into clear narratives and decisions.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Business, Finance, or a related field.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience at a payments company, neobank, card issuer/acquirer, or fintech at scale
• Exposure to real-time gross settlement (RTGS), ISO 20022 migration, or cross-border money movement
• Background working with embedded finance or BaaS platforms
• Experience managing through a major regulatory audit or remediation (e.g., CFPB, OCC, FinCEN)
• Direct experience with cloud transformation (AWS, Azure, GCP), platform modernization, data/AI programs, or core banking/payments platform migrations.

Leadership Competencies

• Strategic Thinking — Connects technology execution to business outcomes and long-term competitive positioning.
• Executive Influence — Builds credibility quickly across senior stakeholders; communicates with clarity and conviction.
• Bias for Outcomes — Drives delivery and benefits realization, not just activity.
• Operational Rigor — Brings structure, discipline, and data to ambiguous, high-stakes problems.
• Talent Multiplier — Develops leaders, attracts top talent, and builds organizations that outperform.
• Integrity & Judgment — Demonstrates the highest standards of ethics, transparency, and decision-making.

Privacy Statement

FIS is committed to protecting the privacy and security of all personal information that we process in order to provide services to our clients. For specific information on how FIS protects personal information online, please see the Online Privacy Notice.

EEOC Statement

FIS is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, genetic information, national origin, disability, veteran status, and other protected characteristics. The EEO is the Law poster is available here supplement document available here

For positions located in the US, the following conditions apply. If you are made a conditional offer of employment, you will be required to undergo a drug test. ADA Disclaimer: In developing this job description care was taken to include all competencies needed to successfully perform in this position. However, for Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) purposes, the essential functions of the job may or may not have been described for purposes of ADA reasonable accommodation. All reasonable accommodation requests will be reviewed and evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Sourcing Model

Recruitment at FIS works primarily on a direct sourcing model; a relatively small portion of our hiring is through recruitment agencies. FIS does not accept resumes from recruitment agencies which are not on the preferred supplier list and is not responsible for any related fees for resumes submitted to job postings, our employees, or any other part of our company.

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