Tech Lead (Backend): Fraud

Skills

About the Role

You'll own the technical direction, architecture, and engineering delivery of the Fraud subdomain within BVNK's FinCrime domain. As a technical guardian, you'll be hands-on in the codebase, accountable for your squad's technical health, and responsible for architecture, code quality, practices, and risk. You'll define the end-to-end technical vision for fraud detection, prevention, and response, lead the integration of Unit21 as BVNK's fraud engine, and build the engineering practices and standards that turn fraud prevention into a competitive advantage. You'll mentor and grow the fraud engineering squad, set engineering standards, manage technical debt, and foster a healthy engineering culture. You'll collaborate across domains such as Payments Orchestration, Digital Assets, Onboarding, Fiat, FinCrime, and Back Office, author RFCs and technical briefs, and oversee reporting pipelines feeding real-time fraud dashboards. You'll also own production reliability for fraud services, ensuring observability, runbooks, and alerting are in place, and you'll participate in on-call rotations and lead incident response.

Requirements

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience in Java or Kotlin with Spring Boot, with at least 2 years in a Tech Lead or senior technical leadership role
• Strong distributed systems expertise building microservices with event-driven architectures (Kafka, SQS), relational databases (MySQL/PostgreSQL on Aurora), and caching (Redis)
• Experience with fraud detection, financial crime, or risk systems including rule engines, risk scoring systems, or transaction monitoring platforms
• Understanding of velocity checks, device fingerprinting, behavioural analytics, risk tiering, and pre-auth/post-auth decision flows
• Architectural leadership with proven ability to define technical vision, write ADRs, lead architecture reviews, and make high-stakes design decisions
• Solid grasp of domain-driven design, hexagonal architecture, and clean service boundaries
• Real-time decision systems experience designing low-latency, high-stakes decision services on live transaction flows
• Cross-domain collaboration skills working with engineering teams, product managers, compliance teams, and fraud analysts
• Excellent communication skills to surface risks, facilitate stakeholders, and present technical strategy to leadership

Responsibilities

• Define and own the fraud engineering architecture including real-time fraud decision services, event enrichment pipelines, device and behavioural signal collection, fraud engine integration, and case management connectors
• Build and mentor the fraud engineering squad
• Tailor work assignments to individual growth and run group knowledge-sharing sessions
• Set and maintain engineering standards including coding standards, review practices, testing strategy, and observability standards
• Track and reduce technical debt proactively
• Promote healthy engineering culture and open communication
• Lead cross-domain technical alignment with Payments Orchestration, Digital Assets, Onboarding, Fiat, FinCrime, and Back Office
• Drive architecture reviews by authoring and shepherding RFCs and technical briefs
• Build fraud reporting and metrics pipelines from the fraud engine into Snowflake and QuickSight
• Own production reliability for fraud services including observability, runbooks, and alerting
• Participate in on-call rotations and lead incident response for fraud-critical services
• Drive root-cause analysis and prevention
• Contribute hands-on engineering while balancing technical direction, team growth, and coordination

Benefits

• Flexible working hours
• Hybrid working
• Flexible approach to holiday
• Opportunities to travel to offices around the world