Lead Engineer — Payments Platform (Laravel)
Location: Fully Remote (USA) · Timezone-aligned Compensation: 110k–145k + Equity + Quarterly Performance Bonuses
The Mission: Building the Operating System for Trade Schools
Lumion is the all-in-one operating system for trade and technical schools. We are the central platform that powers the entire institution — from the first lead generated, to enrollment, tuition payments, compliance reporting, and alumni career tracking. Backed by TTV Capital and Tusk Venture Partners, we run an AI-first stack from the ground up.
Payments are how the business breathes. Every tuition dollar collected is the American Dream, financed — and the machinery that moves that money has to be right, to the penny, every single time. You are being hired to lead the team that owns it.
The Role
You will lead the Payments team , and Lumion will hold you accountable for one thing above all: that payments work — correctly, reliably, every single time.
That is the spine of this job. Money comes in. Interest accrues. Tax is allocated. Payments split across dozens of periods. Chargebacks, refunds, and ACH returns unwind. Facilitators settle. When any of that is off — by a cent, by a day, by one misordered allocation bucket — a school loses income, overstates a tax remittance, or a borrower sees a payoff quote they can't trust. Payment plans amortize the way they should. Daily interest accrues on schedule. Payoffs quote to the penny. Taxes are collected and remitted correctly. You are the person the company holds responsible for the payments platform functioning, and you carry that accountability without flinching.
You'll also have a big say in where the payments product goes next. You live in this product every day, so your read on what we build next, which bets are worth making, and how the money mechanics and borrower-facing experience should evolve carries real weight — you help shape the roadmap and argue for it, rather than receiving it as a stack of specs. You won't always have the final call, but you'll rarely be in a payments product conversation without being one of the most important voices in it.
You lead a team of senior engineers who don't need hand-holding — you set the course, make the calls, hold the standard, and choose who joins the team as it grows. And you do it from inside the code: this isn't a role you can run from a board of tickets. You'll read the ledger, trace the payoff, and reason about the money math yourself, because the domain demands it and because you own the result.
What This Actually Is (An Honest Section)
This is not generic "payments processing." It's educational finance with real teeth: interest that accrues daily, tuition sales tax that has to be applied and remitted correctly across jurisdictions, payments that split across dozens of periods, and chargebacks, refunds, and ACH returns that all have to unwind cleanly — across several payment facilitators, each with its own quirks. A one-cent or one-day error here isn't cosmetic. It's a school's income, a tax filing, or a borrower's trust.
To prove you have read this: tell us in your application what you would do with a golden banana. There are no wrong answers, except not answering.
So the work rewards a specific kind of person: someone who's genuinely happy chasing a payoff that's off by a single cent until the ledger ties out and they can explain exactly why. If that sounds satisfying rather than tedious, this is the role.
What You'll Own
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That payments work. End to end, correctly, every time — across every contract shape, every allocation path, every reversal, and every facilitator. This is the spine of the role and the thing you are accountable for.
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A big voice in product direction. You have real influence over the roadmap and priorities for payments — where it goes next and which bets are worth making. You shape and argue for that direction rather than waiting to be handed it, even when the final call is a shared one.
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The full payments