Principal Architect - Money and Payments R&D

Company
Federal Reserve Bank of Boston
The Federal Reserve System serves as the central bank of the United States. Its fundamental mission is to foster the stability, integrity, and efficiency of the nation's monetary, financial, and payments systems.
This position is responsible for supporting the Federal Reserve System's Research and Development around the future of money and payments.
What we do:
Given the role of the US dollar and payment systems, the Federal Reserve System seeks to further understand the implications, costs, and benefits of the use of different technologies for the future of money and payments. This position offers a unique opportunity to be part of a world-class team working on cutting-edge technologies related to digital money and payments including tokenization, application of smart contracts, artificial intelligence and advanced cryptography. You will participate in a dynamic work environment that has the feel of a startup while also maintaining the benefits of a larger organization.
This role requires an in-person schedule. Candidates must reside in a commutable distance from the Boston, San Francisco or Dallas Fed Bank location.
How You'll Succeed
Core Technical Leadership

• Architect high-throughput distributed payment systems (100K+ TPS) with strong consistency guarantees
• Design and implement EVM virtual machine infrastructure with parallel execution capabilities
• Write production-grade Solidity implementing settlement, orchestration, and atomic cross-service composition
• Optimize transaction processing for extreme load through parallelization and intelligent partitioning
• Build cryptographic protocols including zero-knowledge proofs for privacy-preserving validation
• Establish code quality standards and lead reviews across smart contracts, infrastructure, cryptography, and DevOps

Platform & Infrastructure

• Architect cloud-native platforms with multi-region resilience and horizontal scalability
• Design unified data platforms enabling cross-system analytics and eliminating data silos
• Build Kubernetes-based orchestration with custom operators for distributed applications
• Implement GitOps workflows (ArgoCD/Flux) and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/Pulumi)
• Create CI/CD pipelines with comprehensive testing, security scanning, and zero-downtime deployments
• Establish observability strategies with distributed tracing, metrics, and real-time alerting

AI-Native Payment Innovation

• Translate payment system challenges into AI-native and agentic capabilities that modernize payment workflows and operations
• Design and implement agentic AI systems for autonomous payment orchestration, fraud detection, and real-time decision-making
• Architect AI-enabled payment rails that leverage machine learning for intelligent routing, liquidity optimization, and risk management
• Build agentic commerce capabilities enabling autonomous financial transactions and smart contract execution
• Develop AI systems that enhance payment system resilience through predictive analytics and anomaly detection
• Design multi-agent systems for coordinating complex payment workflows across institutional boundaries

AI-First Engineering & Automation

• Drive adoption of AI-assisted programming tools (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, etc.) to accelerate development velocity system-wide
• Build AI agents and custom tooling automating code review, testing, documentation, and security scanning
• Establish governance and best practices for responsible AI usage in production systems
• Lead the shift toward AI-enabled software development operations, reducing manual burden and improving code quality
• Create frameworks for AI-assisted development that scale across distributed engineering teams

Strategic Impact

• Connect AI capabilities to strategic payment system value, ensuring AI delivers measurable business outcomes
• Translate complex technical concepts into business value for executive stakeholders and policymakers
• Synthesize stakeholder pain points into validated AI-native technical solutions
• Mentor engineers across application development, platform engineering, DevOps, and AI implementation
• Lead proof-of-concept development demonstrating feasibility of emerging payment and AI technologies
• Drive cross-functional coordination across business lines, IT, security, and compliance to enable integrated AI delivery

What You Bring
Required Technical Expertise

• Distributed Systems: Deep knowledge of consistency models, concurrency control (2PL, MVCC, OCC), transaction parallelization, and deadlock resolution
• Smart Contracts: Expert Solidity programming, EVM architecture implementation, gas optimization, security auditing, and composable contract design
• Cryptography: Experience implementing zero-knowledge proofs, Merkle trees, digital signatures, and blockchain-agnostic verification protocols
• AI/ML for Payments: Experience applying machine learning to financial systems including fraud detection, intelligent routing, risk assessment, or payment optimization
• Agentic AI Systems: Understanding of multi-agent architectures, autonomous decision-making systems, and AI orchestration frameworks
• Kubernetes & Cloud-Native: Expert-level K8s including operators and admission controllers; Helm charts; service mesh technologies
• DevOps & Observability: Infrastructure as Code, GitOps workflows, CI/CD pipelines, distributed tracing (Jaeger/Tempo), metrics (Prometheus/Grafana)
• AI-Assisted Development: Demonstrated expertise leveraging AI coding tools, building custom AI agents, and driving AI-first engineering adoption at scale

Domain Experience

• Background in high-performance financial systems (payments, settlement, trading) with understanding of operational workflows
• Experience identifying and translating business problems into AI-native capabilities
• Understanding of consensus protocols (CFT/BFT) and their trade-offs
• Knowledge of payment system modernization challenges and AI applications in financial services
• FinOps practices and cloud cost optimization
• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Distributed Systems, Cryptography, Machine Learning, or related field preferred

Leadership & Communication

• Exceptional ability to communicate technical concepts to non-technical executives and policymakers
• Track record leading cross-functional teams from prototype to production in complex regulated environments
• Experience translating business requirements and operational pain points into technical architectures
• Ability to connect AI innovation to measurable business outcomes and strategic value
• Experience driving organizational transformation and technology adoption at enterprise scale
• Ability to balance innovation with pragmatism, ensuring responsible AI deployment in production systems

The salary range for this position is $178,600 - $223,200 - $267,800. The Boston Fed believes in salary transparency. The final salary and offer will be determined by the applicant's background, skills, internal equity, and alignment with market data. Whether you're developing into the job or are a more seasoned candidate, we aim to pay competitively. If you reside outside of the 1st District (Boston Fed) you may be hired by your local Federal Reserve District and compensation will follow hiring District's range and policy.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston is committed to provide equal employment opportunities to all persons without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, genetic information, disability, or military service.
All employees assigned to this position will be subject to FBI fingerprint/ criminal background and Patriot Act/ Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) watch list checks at least once every five years.
For this job, any offer of employment is contingent upon successfully passing a two-phase security screening. The first phase consists of the satisfactory completion of a physical examination (including a drug screening), reference checks, and a security investigation consisting of credit and criminal history checks.
The second phase is an additional risk-based security screening determined by the risk rating of the position. Depending upon the sensitivity of the position, this phase may include, and is not limited to, work and residency eligibility verification, and personal interviews with the candidate, references, and prior employers.
All applicants must have resided in the United States for at least three (3) years.
Full Time / Part Time
Full time
Regular / Temporary
Regular
Job Exempt (Yes / No)
Yes
Job Category
Information Technology Family Group
Work Shift
First (United States of America)
The Federal Reserve Banks are committed to equal employment opportunity for employees and job applicants in compliance with applicable law and to an environment where employees are valued for their differences.
Always verify and apply to jobs on Federal Reserve System Careers (https://rb.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/FRS) or through verified Federal Reserve Bank social media channels.
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