Lead Solutions Engineer

About the Role

You will operate at the intersection of product, engineering, and business development, translating complex legacy payments systems and customer constraints into clear, workable integrations using Polygon's payments stack and broader Web3 infrastructure.

This is not a pure sales role and not a pure engineering role. You will independently scope integrations, unblock deals, and guide customers through ambiguity. You will also use AI tools actively to build demos, accelerate prototyping, and move faster than a traditional solutions function.

Your Responsibilities

Pre-Sales Solutions Engineering

• Partner with BD to support late-stage deals and technical evaluations.
• Lead technical discovery with customers, especially around complex legacy payments systems, fund flows, and compliance constraints.
• Map customer business models (tradfi, fintech, platforms, embedded finance, global payments) to scalable payments architectures.
• Translate customer business and system requirements into concrete implementation approaches.
• Design and explain integrations involving wallets, payments APIs, KYC/KYB, onboarding, risk and compliance services, widgets, SDKs, hosted components, and embedded payment experiences.
• Create reference architectures, integration diagrams, payment flow documentation, and technical walkthroughs.
• Act as the technical authority in customer conversations when sales or product cannot go deep enough.
• Demonstrate deep expertise in payment authorization rates, conversion optimization, and transaction success metrics.
• Use AI tools daily to accelerate the creation of demos, prototypes, and technical documentation during active sales cycles.

Integration and Deal Shaping

• Identify gaps between current product capabilities and customer requirements.
• Clearly distinguish between what already exists, what is on the roadmap and can be accelerated, and what would require bespoke or speculative development.
• Translate ambiguous customer asks into crisp, sellable technical scopes.
• Negotiate tradeoffs with customers to land deals even when requirements are not a perfect fit.
• Partner with Sales to unblock deals by de-risking payments integrations early.
• Work closely with Product and Engineering to shape roadmap decisions based on real customer demand.
• Influence commercial structure (pricing, limits, launch phases) based on technical realities.

Technical Execution

• Build lightweight prototypes, middleware, or example implementations where helpful.
• Use AI-assisted development, including code generation tools and AI-driven prototyping, to rapidly build and iterate on demos, proof-of-concept systems, and integration examples.
• Read and reason about customer codebases, API specs, and architecture diagrams.
• Help customers understand how to integrate with modern systems when their internal infrastructure is outdated or rigid.
• Anticipate scale, failure modes, and operational complexity in production payments systems.
• Identify where AI tooling can accelerate a customer's own integration process and recommend specific approaches.
• Apply AI tools to compress timelines on documentation, diagram generation, and implementation guides.

Post-Sales

• Support initial customer implementations and early production issues.
• Act as a technical escalation point when integrations hit complexity.
• Help define what scalable post-sales support looks like over time.
• Ensure clean handoff to Support, Account Management, or Professional Services.

What You'll Need

• Strong background in payments, fintech, or financial infrastructure.
• Hands-on familiarity with fund flows, settlement, reconciliation, disputes, and money movement.
• Deep familiarity with legacy payment systems and real-world integration constraints.
• Prior experience in Solutions Engineering, Sales Engineering, or highly technical pre-sales roles at payments companies.
• Proven ability to operate independently with minimal guidance.
• Strong customer empathy and the ability to explain complex systems clearly.
• Active, daily use of AI tools, including code generation assistants, AI-driven prototyping environments, and LLM-based documentation tools, to increase personal output and speed.
• Ability to use AI to build working demos and proof-of-concept integrations quickly, without waiting on engineering resources.
• Comfort coding and building small technical solutions or prototypes, with or without AI assistance.
• Solid understanding of APIs, webhooks, payment integrations, and system architecture.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working with wallets, on-chain payments, or blockchain-based infrastructure.
• Knowledge of global payment regulations (PSD2, SCA, Open Banking).
• Exposure to regulated environments and compliance-driven system design.
• Experience working across time zones and with globally distributed teams.
• Distributed systems experience.
• Web3 experience.

Check out our AI Usage Guidelines to understand how we approach AI tools during the hiring process.