Tech Lead (Backend): Fraud
Job description
Tech Lead for the Fraud subdomain within BVNK's FinCrime domain, owning the technical direction, architecture, and engineering delivery of fraud detection, prevention, and response capabilities. The role is hands-on in the codebase and accountable for the squad's technical health.
At a glance
- Employment
- Full-time · Employee (employment agreement)
- Work mode
- Hybrid · Bulgaria · Poland · South Africa · Spain
- Pay
- EUR 95,000 – 120,000 / year
What you'll do
- Define and own the fraud engineering architecture — design 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 — tailor work assignments to individual growth, run group knowledge-sharing sessions, give regular and specific feedback
- Set and maintain engineering standards — establish coding standards, review practices, testing strategy, and observability standards
- Track and reduce technical debt proactively — keep tech debt visible and balanced against delivery every planning cycle
- Promote healthy engineering culture — foster collaboration, continuous learning, and professional growth
- Lead cross-domain technical alignment with Payments Orchestration, Digital Assets, Onboarding, Fiat, FinCrime, and Back Office; define clear interaction modes per BVNK's domain interaction model
- Drive architecture reviews — author and shepherd RFCs and technical briefs
- Build fraud reporting and metrics pipelines — oversee 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 — ensure observability (Grafana, Prometheus), runbooks, and alerting; participate in on-call rotations, lead incident response for fraud-critical services, and drive root-cause analysis and prevention
- Ship with quality — contribute hands-on engineering while balancing technical direction, team growth, and coordination
- Lead the integration of Unit21 as BVNK's fraud engine
What we're looking for
- 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); designing reliable, scalable, observable systems
- Experience with fraud detection, financial crime, or risk systems — building or leading teams building fraud engines, 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 — defining technical vision, writing ADRs, leading architecture reviews, making high-stakes design decisions across multiple services and domains; grasp of domain-driven design, hexagonal architecture, and clean service boundaries
- Real-time decision systems experience — designing services that make low-latency, high-stakes decisions on live transaction flows
- Cross-domain collaboration skills — working across multiple engineering teams, product managers, compliance teams, and fraud analysts; facilitating technical alignment without creating bottlenecks
- Excellent communication — proactively surfacing risks and deviations, facilitating across stakeholders, giving continuous feedback, and presenting 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/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
Your team
Fraud subdomain, FinCrime domain
The FinCrime domain protects the integrity of BVNK's platform, customers, and partners by preventing, detecting, and responding to financial crime risk across all products and geographies. The Fraud subdomain builds detection, prevention, and response capabilities protecting BVNK from account takeovers, payment fraud, APP fraud, card fraud, scams, and abuse across fiat and crypto rails.
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About BVNK
The stablecoin-powered financial stack for enterprises
BVNK is the stablecoin-powered financial stack for enterprises, now part of Mastercard. It enables 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, it lets enterprises send, receive, convert, and settle stablecoins and fiat through a single integration.
Mission
To accelerate global money movement
Key facts
- Fintech / stablecoin infrastructure
- Part of Mastercard
- Enables money movement across 130+ countries
- 40+ licenses for fiat and digital assets globally
- Processing billions annually
- Team spread across EMEA, North America, and APAC
- CNBC World's Top Fintech Companies (2026)
- FXC Intelligence Top 100 Cross-border Payment Companies (2026)
- Newsweek's The Top 100 Global Most Loved Workplaces (three years running, most recently 2025)
- LinkedIn Top 20 Startups in the UK (2025)
Partners & customers
What they value
- Passionate, growth-minded people
- Open and creative environment
- Diverse and inclusive team
- Collaboration, continuous learning, and professional growth