Principal Architect - Money and Payments R&D

Company

Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

The Federal Reserve System serves as the central bank of the United States.

Its fundamental mission is to foster the stability, integrity, and efficiency of the nation's monetary, financial, and payments systems.

This position is responsible for supporting the Federal Reserve System's Research and Development around the future of money and payments.

What we do:
Given the role of the US dollar and payment systems, the Federal Reserve System seeks to further understand the implications, costs, and benefits of the use of different technologies for the future of money and payments.

This position offers a unique opportunity to be part of a world-class team working on cutting-edge technologies related to digital money and payments including tokenization, application of smart contracts, artificial intelligence and advanced cryptography.

You will participate in a dynamic work environment that has the feel of a startup while also maintaining the benefits of a larger organization.

This role requires an in-person schedule.

Candidates must reside in a commutable distance from the Boston, San Francisco or Dallas Fed Bank location.

How You'll Succeed

Core Technical Leadership


* Architect high-throughput distributed payment systems (100K+ TPS) with strong consistency guarantees


* Design and implement EVM virtual machine infrastructure with parallel execution capabilities


* Write production-grade Solidity implementing settlement, orchestration, and atomic cross-service composition


* Optimize transaction processing for extreme load through parallelization and intelligent partitioning


* Build cryptographic protocols including zero-knowledge proofs for privacy-preserving validation


* Establish code quality standards and lead reviews across smart contracts, infrastructure, cryptography, and DevOps

Platform & Infrastructure


* Architect cloud-native platforms with multi-region resilience and horizontal scalability


* Design unified data platforms enabling cross-system analytics and eliminating data silos


* Build Kubernetes-based orchestration with custom operators for distributed applications


* Implement GitOps workflows (ArgoCD/Flux) and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/Pulumi)


* Create CI/CD pipelines with comprehensive testing, security scanning, and zero-downtime deployments


* Establish observability strategies with distributed tracing, metrics, and real-time alerting

AI-Native Payment Innovation


* Translate payment system challenges into AI-native and agentic capabilities that modernize payment workflows and operations


* Design and implement agentic AI systems for autonomous payment orchestration, fraud detection, and real-time decision-making


* Architect AI-enabled payment rails that leverage machine learning for intelligent routing, liquidity optimization, and risk management


* Build agentic commerce capabilities enabling autonomous...