Principal Engineer (USA)

About the role

The Principal Engineer (USA) role is one of the most senior individual-contributor engineering roles at Veem. This is a remote full-time, permanent position located in Toronto/GTA with Ottawa as a consideration. The role involves shaping the future of global payments through modern payment infrastructure, intelligent automation, AI-powered operations, and emerging technologies like stablecoins and blockchain.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive Veem’s long-term technical architecture across core payments, platform, data, integration, and operational systems.
• Design scalable, resilient, secure, and highly available distributed systems for global B2B payments.
• Lead complex, cross-functional engineering initiatives spanning multiple teams and systems.
• Drive modernization efforts, improve platform scalability, and reduce technical debt.
• Establish engineering standards for architecture, reliability, observability, security, testing, and operational excellence.
• Lead AI transformation initiatives across engineering and operations.
• Design and implement systems using AI agents, LLM workflows, intelligent automation, and AI-assisted developer tooling.
• Help shape Veem’s strategy around stablecoins, blockchain, digital assets, and modern payment rails.
• Evaluate emerging technologies, settlement mechanisms, fintech protocols, and platform investments.
• Mentor senior engineers and technical leaders while raising the engineering bar across the organization.
• Serve as a trusted technical advisor to executive and engineering leadership.
• Translate business priorities into scalable, practical, and commercially valuable technical solutions.

Requirements

• Approximately 12–18 years of software engineering experience.
• Proven experience operating at Staff+, Senior Staff, Principal Engineer, Architect, or equivalent level.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, backend architecture, APIs, microservices, cloud infrastructure, and event-driven systems.
• Strong hands-on software engineering and architecture capabilities.
• Experience leading technically complex initiatives across multiple teams.
• Demonstrated ability to influence technical strategy without direct authority.
• Experience in fintech, payments, financial services, or another high-scale, highly regulated technology environment.
• Strong understanding of scalability, data consistency, reliability, security, fault tolerance, and production operations.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to explain technical trade-offs to executive and non-technical audiences.
• Ability to operate effectively in a fast-moving, ambiguous, and entrepreneurial environment.

Preferred Experience

• B2B or cross-border payments.
• Payment processing, settlement, reconciliation, ledgering, treasury, foreign exchange, or financial APIs.
• AI agents, LLM integrations, intelligent automation, machine learning platforms, or AI-enabled products.
• Stablecoins, blockchain infrastructure, digital wallets, crypto payments, or digital assets.
• Experience at a modern fintech, payments, technology, or AI-native organization.

Technical Environment

• AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Distributed and event-driven architectures.
• Modern backend platforms, APIs, and microservices.
• Messaging, streaming, and data systems.
• AI/LLM tooling and agent orchestration frameworks.
• Blockchain, stablecoin, and payment infrastructure.
• Observability, reliability, security, and platform tooling.