Senior Lead Software Engineer- Payments Tech - AI-First Developer Portal & External APIs

This is your chance to shape an AI-first Developer Portal —a modern “front door” where clients and their systems can discover capabilities, onboard, troubleshoot, and integrate through agent-ready workflows and high-quality external APIs. As a Senior Vice President of Software Engineering within Payments Technology, you will lead teams and remain hands-on in building secure, stable, scalable platform capabilities that modernize the developer experience for the agentic era.

As a Senior Lead Software Engineer at JPMorgan Chase within Payments Technology, you will lead teams and remain hands-on in building secure, stable, scalable platform capabilities that modernize the developer experience for the agentic era

Role summary

You will own the technical direction and execution for an AI-native portal experience where

• Core portal capabilities are designed to be consumed by agents and automation (with excellent human UX as a companion).
• Workflows are exposed as reusable actions/tools with strong security, auditability, and operational controls.
• External API experiences are productized to be easy to discover, evaluate, and integrate—at scale.

Job responsibilities

• Lead the creation of an AI-first Developer Portal experience : define architecture patterns for agent-ready workflows, tool/action schemas, context assembly, and safe execution.
• Build and operate AI-enabled support experiences (assistant + workflow automation) with contextual understanding of client/workspace state, integration progress, and troubleshooting signals.
• Design and deliver secure external API platform capabilities : contract-first API design (OpenAPI), versioning strategy, backward compatibility, idempotency, pagination, consistent error models, and developer usability.
• Own authentication and credential workflows for external integrations , including patterns for certificate handling, credential rotation, and secure onboarding journeys.
• Establish engineering standards for AI + automation in production : evaluation and test strategy, release gating, telemetry, audit logging, and incident response for AI/tooling systems.
• Remain hands-on (~50%) through critical-path coding, architecture reviews, code reviews, debugging, and performance/resiliency improvements.
• Drive cross-functional, federated delivery by partnering with API owners, security, and shared services to deliver a unified client experience despite distributed backend ownership.
• Coach and develop engineers : set expectations for quality, delivery discipline, design rigor, and collaboration; actively grow technical talent and leadership bench.

Required qualifications, capabilities, and skills

• Formal training or certification in software engineering concepts and 5+ years applied experience; demonstrated coaching/mentoring experience.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience building and operating distributed systems at scale.
• 3+ years of experience leading software engineering teams and delivering complex platforms/products with measurable outcomes.
• Strong hands-on backend development experience in Java (other modern backend stacks acceptable).
• Proven expertise building external-facing APIs and integration platforms , including contract-first design, lifecycle/version management, security controls, and operational readiness.
• Strong security fundamentals for external integrations: OAuth2/OIDC concepts, mTLS, PKI/certificates, secrets management, secure SDLC, and threat modeling.
• Experience building AI-enabled product capabilities in production (beyond simple chat): grounded retrieval/search, structured tool/action execution, guardrails, evaluation practices, monitoring, and auditability.
• Proficient in automation and continuous delivery methods; advanced understanding of agile and modern SDLC practices.
• Strong understanding of application resiliency and observability (logs/metrics/traces), performance engineering, and incident management.
• Experience working in regulated environments with strong controls, compliance requirements, and reliability expectations.

Preferred qualifications, capabilities, and skills

• Developer portal or developer-experience platform experience (onboarding journeys, documentation-as-a-product, integration tooling, sandbox/test experiences).
• Experience building workflow/orchestration systems (state machines, async processing, retries, compensating actions).
• Search and relevance experience (enterprise search, ranking, contextual retrieval, content quality signals).
• Cloud-native delivery experience (containers/Kubernetes) and event-driven architectures (webhooks/callbacks/streams).
• Prior payments, treasury, or broader financial-services platform experience.