Tech Lead (Backend): Fraud

About us:

We believe the next generation of financial services will be powered by stablecoins.

Founded in 2021, our mission at BVNK is to accelerate global money movement.

We’re building stablecoin-native infrastructure so businesses can move value instantly across borders and networks. With global licenses and T1 bank partnerships, we facilitate billions in transactions for enterprise clients like Worldpay, Deel, LianLian Global, and Rapyd.

Our technology is transforming how businesses operate globally by eliminating payment delays, reducing costs, and unlocking trapped capital. 

We’re a diverse team spread across EMEA, North America, and APAC, with a shared belief that stablecoins are the new infrastructure layer for financial services, and that BVNK is at the forefront of this shift.

In 2025, we secured strategic investment from Visa, following our $50 million Series B with Haun Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Scribble Ventures, DRW Venture Capital, Avenir, and Tiger Global. With the backing of these leading investors, we’re accelerating our growth – and we're looking for smart, ambitious people to help us build the future of financial services.

We're incredibly honored to have made Newsweek's list of The Top 100 Global Most Loved Workplaces three years running (most recently in 2025) and to have been recognised by LinkedIn as one of the Top 20 Startups in the UK in 2024.

Location: We offer a Hybrid/Remote working policy. 

About this role in the team:

We're looking for a Tech Lead to own the technical direction, architecture, and engineering delivery of the Fraud subdomain within BVNK's FinCrime domain.

At BVNK, the Tech Lead is a technical guardian, hands-on in the codebase, accountable for the squad's technical health. You'll own the technical side (architecture, code quality, practices, risk). Your leverage comes from multiplying the team's capability building independent decision-making across the squad, not becoming the sole bottleneck.

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. It provides a consistent, policy-driven decision layer for risk across onboarding, transactions, and ongoing customer lifecycle events, screening providers, transaction monitoring, and fraud controls. Within this domain, the Fraud subdomain is responsible for building the 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 technical leadership opportunity at a critical moment. BVNK is building a comprehensive, data-driven fraud detection and prevention framework that can scale with the company's rapid growth into new products and new markets.. 

You'll define the technical architecture, lead the integration of Unit21 as BVNK's fraud engine, and build the engineering practices and standards that turn fraud prevention from a gap into a competitive advantage.

Key Areas of Responsibilities:

Technical ownership & architecture

• Define and own the fraud engineering architecture — Design the end-to-end technical vision for fraud detection, prevention, and response at BVNK: real-time fraud decision services, event enrichment pipelines, device and behavioural signal collection, fraud engine integration, and case management connectors. 

Team growth & engineering culture

• 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. Encourage open communication, mutual respect, and a shared sense of ownership.

Cross-domain collaboration & delivery

• Lead cross-domain technical alignment — Facilitate collaboration with Payments Orchestration, Digital Assets, Onboarding (customer risk assessment and fraud due diligence), Fiat, FinCrime, and Back Office . Define clear interaction modes per BVNK's domain interaction model.
• Drive the architecture reviews — Author and shepherd RFCs and technical briefs 
• Build fraud reporting and metrics pipelines — Oversee the engineering of automated data pipelines from the fraud engine into Snowflake and QuickSight, enabling real-time fraud dashboards, KPI tracking and regulatory reporting.

Operational excellence

• Own production reliability for fraud services — Ensure all fraud services have adequate 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.

What we need from you: 

• 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). You can design systems that are reliable, scalable, and observable by default.
• Experience with fraud detection, financial crime, or risk systems — you've built or led teams building fraud engines, rule engines, risk scoring systems, or transaction monitoring platforms. You understand concepts like velocity checks, device fingerprinting, behavioural analytics, risk tiering, and pre-auth/post-auth decision flows.
• Architectural leadership — 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 — you've designed services that make low-latency, high-stakes decisions on live transaction flows where correctness and performance are non-negotiable.
• Cross-domain collaboration skills — you work effectively across multiple engineering teams, product managers, compliance teams, and fraud analysts. You can facilitate technical alignment across domains without creating bottlenecks.
• Excellent communication — you proactively surface risks and deviations, facilitate across stakeholders, give continuous feedback, and can present technical strategy to engineering leadership with confidence.

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.

What you can expect from us:

• Fair and competitive salary at every stage of your growth
• Flexible working hours, with hybrid working at its heart
• A culture built on passionate, growth-minded people
• A flexible approach to holiday
• Opportunities to travel to our offices around the world
• An open and creative environment where you can help us define the future of BVNK, its culture, and its opportunity sets

At BVNK, we are focused on building a diverse and inclusive team. While you may not meet all of our requirements, we’d encourage you to apply if you meet the majority of our expectations. You may be a great fit for this role or another role in our team.