Open for Engineering Manager & Staff / Lead / Principal roles

Engineering leader who stays close to the code.

Hands-on Engineering Manager & Software Architect. Two decades building FinTech payments platforms at scale.

open to
Engineering Manager (Hands-On) · Staff / Lead / Principal Engineer · Software Architect
domains
Payments · FinTech · Platform infrastructure · Distributed systems
mode
Remote (US-based) · Select hybrid
auth
Authorized to work in the USA · Green Card
View EM resume View IC resume

Currently

role
Engineering Manager (Hands-On) · Kort Payments
building
Zero-downtime AWS migration · CI/CD modernization · On-call program
stack
.NET 8 · AWS (EC2, RDS, SQS) · Kafka · SQL Server
learning
AI-augmented engineering — Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Cursor, Gemini, OpenAI
location
California · Open to remote

About

How I work, and what I'm looking for.

I run engineering teams the way I wish someone had run mine when I was a Senior IC — clear goals, clear standards, a real on-call rotation, and a manager who can still pair on the hard refactor. Hands-on Engineering Manager isn't a hedge; it's a deliberate operating model.

Over the better part of a decade in FinTech payments at Paysafe and Kort, I've done two big platform modernizations end-to-end: decomposing a 1.5M-LOC .NET monolith into 20+ event-driven microservices on Azure, and lifting a mission-critical .NET payments platform to AWS with zero downtime and full PCI DSS compliance. I've owned audit cycles, processor recertifications (TSYS, Fiserv), bank-onboarding integrations, and the secure-SDLC standards that make those things possible.

By the numbers

20+
.NET Core microservices architected at Paysafe
2
platform modernizations end-to-end
+40%
release-velocity lift, team-wide
12
engineers currently leading at Kort

Selected systems

Three platforms I've shipped.

Architecture sketches and headline metrics from the systems I led end-to-end. Each links to a full breakdown article.

SYS-01

Zero-downtime AWS migration

.NET payments platform · PCI DSS · 2025 – present · Kort Payments

Latency
−25%
Audit
Clean PCI
Downtime
0
Read the breakdown

SYS-02

Monolith → 20+ microservices

1.5M-LOC .NET decomposition · DDD · 2019 – 2025 · Paysafe

Velocity
+40%
Services
20+
LOC freed
1.5M
Read the breakdown

SYS-03

Kafka event-flow modernization

WCF → REST · Kafka producers / consumers · 2017 – 2019 · Paysafe

Events
150K/min
Latency
< 1s
Recerts
TSYS · Fiserv
Read the breakdown

Experience

18 years building payments platforms.

  1. Current Mar 2025 — Present

    Engineering Manager (Hands-On) · Lead Software Engineer

    Kort Payments (acquired by Paysafe) · FinTech / Payments · Remote

    • Leading the zero-downtime AWS migration of a mission-critical .NET payments platform (EC2, RDS, SQS, CloudWatch, IAM) with full PCI DSS compliance.
    • Managing a 12-engineer team; designed the on-call rotation, blameless post-mortem process, design-doc review practice, and code-review standards.
    • Refactored core services with idempotency keys, retry-with-backoff, and circuit breakers — payment-processing latency down 25%.
    • Modernized CI/CD: trunk-based, feature flags, blue-green deploys — daily releases instead of weekly.

  2. Jun 2019 — Feb 2025

    Lead Software Engineer · Solution Architect

    Paysafe Group · FinTech / Payments · Remote

    • Architected enterprise-scale FinTech payments platforms serving millions of users across multiple markets.
    • Decomposed a 1.5M-LOC .NET Framework monolith into 20+ .NET Core microservices on Azure (Azure VMs, Event Grid) — DDD bounded contexts and event sourcing.
    • Designed the CI/CD platform (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, canary deploys) — +40% release velocity team-wide.
    • Authored REST API and platform standards (OpenAPI 3.0, idempotency-key conventions, error envelopes) adopted org-wide.
    • Owned PCI DSS audit readiness across services; clean audit passes across multiple consecutive cycles.
    • Mentored 10+ engineers; led the cross-team architecture forum.

  3. Jul 2017 — Jun 2019

    Senior Software Engineer

    Paysafe Group · FinTech / Payments · Irvine, CA

    • Designed Kafka producer/consumer services for payments event flows; modernized legacy WCF endpoints to REST.
    • Led TSYS and Fiserv processor recertifications and onboarded new banking partners.
    • Cut high-severity Veracode findings by 30% via dependency upgrades, input-validation hardening, and secure-coding training.
    • Delivered 2FA and platform-wide security enhancements; strengthened PCI DSS compliance.

  4. Jun 2014 — Jun 2017

    Senior Software Engineer

    CraneMorley · E-Learning · Long Beach, CA

    • Modernized legacy CMS, LMS, and Microsoft Dynamics platforms — refactored ASP, VB, and DotNetNuke for scalability.
    • Cut median report-generation time by 85% via SQL Server query rewrites and indexing strategy.
    • Led development of client-specific SPAs, certification engines, and SCORM API integrations.

  5. 2008 — 2014

    Earlier Experience

    Senior Software Engineer (Part-Time), The Dependable Companies — Logistics (LA, 2016). Software Engineer, Upwork (CA, 2012–2014). IT / Junior Software Engineer, Credit Agricole Bank — Banking (Cairo, 2009–2011). .NET Software Engineer, Travel Solutions Egypt (Cairo, 2008–2009).

How I work

Six operating principles.

The rules I run engineering teams by. Earned the hard way.

  1. The on-call pager goes to the person who can read the stack trace.

    Engineering leadership is technical leadership. Process matters; so does pairing on the hard refactor at 3 AM.

  2. Architecture is a writing practice.

    Design documents and decision records before the code. If it isn't written down — the reasoning, the trade-offs, the alternatives considered — it didn't happen.

  3. Idempotency, retries, and circuit breakers are not optional in payments.

    The same way TLS isn't optional. Build them in from day one, or pay for them later in chargebacks, reconciliation, and trust.

  4. Blameless post-mortems with action-item follow-through.

    The blameless culture is the easy half. The follow-through — tracking action items to closure across sprints — is the whole point of the exercise.

  5. Migrations happen behind feature flags, with measured cutovers.

    "Zero-downtime" is a discipline, not a slogan. Strangler-fig at the API gateway, blue-green for the critical path, dual-write for the data layer. Strategy varies per surface.

  6. AI-augmented engineering is a team practice, not a personal trick.

    Cursor, Claude, Gemini are tools. The standards, the reviews, and the prompt patterns are the work. I roll them out with guidelines, not memos.

Working with

.NET 8 · C# · ASP.NET · REST APIs (OpenAPI) · WCF (modernizing to REST) · Microservices · Event-Driven Architecture · DDD · CQRS · Event Sourcing · Kafka · Idempotency keys · Circuit Breaker · Retry / Backoff · Rate limiting · AWS (EC2, RDS, DynamoDB, SQS, S3, CloudWatch, IAM, KMS) · Azure (Azure VMs, Event Grid, Azure DevOps) · SQL Server · MongoDB · Cosmos DB · CI/CD pipelines · Feature flags · Blue-green & canary deploys · PCI DSS · OWASP · Veracode (SAST) · DAST · TLS 1.2+ · Secure SDLC · SLOs / SLIs / error budgets · Structured logging · Blameless post-mortems · On-call program design · Hiring & interview loops · Performance calibration · AI-augmented engineering (Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini) · Angular · React · TypeScript

Writing & Featured Work

Recent thinking.

Notes on payments architecture, modernization, and engineering leadership. Most pieces are anonymized lessons from production work.

Architecture

Migrating a .NET Payments Platform to AWS with Zero Downtime

What "zero downtime" actually means for a payments platform, the five categories of risk we mapped before cutover, and the rollback gate that almost saved us at 3 AM.

2026 · 12 min read

Read

Architecture

Decomposing a 1.5M-LOC Monolith Without Stopping the World

How we sequenced the strangler-fig migration of a payments monolith into 20+ microservices — bounded contexts, the contract-test layer that bought us speed, and the mistake we made with the outbox pattern.

2026 · 14 min read

Read

Engineering Leadership

What "Hands-On Engineering Manager" Actually Means

The math behind 30% time in code as an EM. Where it pays compound interest, where it backfires, and the question I ask before every IC-task I take on.

2026 · 10 min read

Read

Payments

Idempotency Keys in Payments — Five Mistakes I've Watched Get Shipped

The "obviously correct" idempotency implementations that ship duplicate charges anyway. Composite keys, retry windows, and what to actually store.

2026 · 11 min read

Read

View all writing

Contact

Let's talk.

I'm exploring Engineering Manager and Staff Engineer roles at engineering-led companies — particularly in payments, FinTech, and platform infrastructure. If that sounds like you, the fastest way to reach me is email.

Email fady.massoud@live.com LinkedIn /in/fadymassoud Indeed /p/Fady_-Massoud

Resume — pick the version that matches your role

Engineering Manager version Staff / Lead Engineer version

PDF download available on each resume page.