Tech Lead (Backend): Fraud

As a Tech Lead at BVNK, you own the technical direction, architecture, and engineering delivery of the Fraud subdomain within the FinCrime domain. You are a technical guardian, hands-on in the codebase and accountable for your squad's technical health. The Fraud subdomain builds detection, prevention, and response capabilities that protect BVNK from account takeovers, payment fraud, APP (Authorised Push Payment) fraud, card fraud, scams, and abuse across both fiat and crypto rails. This is a greenfield opportunity to define the technical architecture, lead the integration of Unit21 as BVNK's fraud engine, and establish the engineering practices that turn fraud prevention into a competitive advantage.

What you'll do

• Define and own the fraud engineering architecture, designing the end-to-end technical vision for fraud detection, prevention, and response: 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, tailoring work assignments to individual growth, running knowledge-sharing sessions, and giving regular feedback.
• Set and maintain engineering standards including coding standards, review practices, testing strategy, and observability standards.
• Track and reduce technical debt proactively, keeping it visible and balanced against delivery every planning cycle.
• Promote healthy engineering culture that fosters collaboration, continuous learning, and professional growth.
• Lead cross-domain technical alignment with Payments Orchestration, Digital Assets, Onboarding, Fiat, FinCrime, and Back Office teams, defining clear interaction modes per BVNK's domain interaction model.
• Drive architecture reviews by authoring and shepherding RFCs and technical briefs.
• Build fraud reporting and metrics pipelines, overseeing the engineering of automated data pipelines from the fraud engine into Snowflake and QuickSight for real-time fraud dashboards, KPI tracking, and regulatory reporting.
• Own production reliability for fraud services, ensuring adequate observability through Grafana and Prometheus, maintaining runbooks and alerting, participating in on-call rotations, and leading incident response and root-cause analysis.
• Contribute hands-on engineering while balancing technical direction, team growth, and coordination.

What you bring

• 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: deep experience 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, having built or led teams building fraud engines, rule engines, risk scoring systems, or transaction monitoring platforms. You understand 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 across multiple services and domains. Solid grasp of domain-driven design, hexagonal architecture, and clean service boundaries.
• Real-time decision systems experience, having designed services that make low-latency, high-stakes decisions on live transaction flows where correctness and performance are non-negotiable.
• Cross-domain collaboration skills, working effectively across multiple engineering teams, product managers, compliance teams, and fraud analysts.
• Excellent communication with the ability to proactively surface risks and deviations, facilitate across stakeholders, give continuous feedback, and present technical strategy to engineering leadership.

Nice to have

• Experience with fraud engines such as Unit21, Sardine, Feedzai, or similar platforms.
• Background in payments fraud (APP fraud, card fraud, ACH returns and chargebacks) or financial crime compliance engineering.
• Experience with device intelligence platforms (Fingerprint.js, ThreatMetrix) and behavioural analytics.
• Familiarity with on-chain fraud intelligence tools (Chainalysis, Elliptic, Alterya, Cyvers).
• Experience building fraud case management integrations with Salesforce or similar CRM platforms.
• Understanding of regulatory frameworks for fraud prevention (PSR APP fraud reimbursement, Nacha ACH thresholds, MiCA).
• Experience with consortium-based fraud data sharing models (Unit21 Sonar or similar).
• Experience managing team cognitive load and applying Team Topologies interaction modes.

What we offer

• Competitive salary: €95,000-€115,000 EUR (Bulgaria), €95,000-€120,000 EUR (Spain), or 480,000-550,000 PLN (Poland), based on candidate experience and relevant certifications.
• Flexible working hours with hybrid working at its heart.
• A flexible approach to holiday.
• Opportunities to travel to offices around the world.
• A culture built on passionate, growth-minded people in an open and creative environment.

About BVNK

BVNK is the stablecoin-powered financial stack for enterprises, now part of Mastercard. You enable businesses to build financial products, unlock new markets, and move money in seconds across 130+ countries with 40+ licenses for fiat and digital assets globally. Processing billions annually, BVNK powers enterprises worldwide to send, receive, convert, and settle stablecoins and fiat seamlessly through a single integration, trusted by industry leaders like Corpay, Worldpay, Deel, and Flywire.