Senior Payments Specialist - Card Compliance [Card Rails]
Senior Payments Specialist — Card Compliance - Card Rails Location: Remote first (Head Office: Cape Town, South Africa; with offices in Johannesburg, Mauritius and Nairobi, Kenya) Department: Engineering - Card Rails Company: Peach Payments About Peach Payments Peach Payments is a cutting-edge fintech company shaping the future of digital payments across Africa. We empower businesses of all sizes - from startups to enterprise merchants - by providing a secure, scalable, and seamless payments infrastructure. Team Mission Card Rails is a POD, within the Card Processing Tribe, which builds and maintains the Card Gateway services and infrastructure, acquirer integrations and connectivity and monitoring and alerting of the same. Our mission is to provide reliable, compliant and secure card payment processing that is cost effective for the following transaction types: Card Not Present (CNP): Ecommerce Transactions Card Present(CP): Instore Transactions 🕵🏿 Role Overview As a Senior Specialist — Card Compliance, you will own the loop between acquirer and implementation review, completing transaction-level verification and UAT testing, and manage acquirer sign-off. You will work shoulder-to-shoulder with the pod, freeing developers from compliance investigation and manual UAT so they can focus on building. You will run certification-style testing, validate ISO 8583 behaviour in real environments, and be the pod’s primary interface with acquirers on implementation correctness. Role expectations Scheme Compliance Ownership Own ongoing alignment with acquirer specifications, scheme mandates, and regulatory requirements relevant to Card Rails implementations. Maintain awareness of scheme rule changes (e.g. Visa, Mastercard) and assess impact and changes required on the Card Gateway. Manage UAT testing and sign-off of scheme compliance items with Acquiring partners and pod. Work with Peach’s Scheme compliance function to stay aligned and updated. Acquirer integrations responsibility Review acquirer requirement documents and implementation spikes, create actionable verification criteria and provide implementation feedback. Run hands-on UAT: construct and execute test transactions, validate Acquirer responses and outcomes. Verify end-to-end behaviour across Card-Present (CP) and Card-Not-Present (CNP) flows independently of developers to ensure edge cases are caught. Coordinate UAT sessions with acquirers and pod, ensuring sign-off is achieved efficiently. ISO-8583 Message Validation Strong experience validating ISO-8583-based message flows in test and certification environments. Field-level validation, bitmap handling, mapping correctness between internal models and acquirer. Interpret data elements in context and analyse impact on approval/decline behaviour. Negative and edge-case testing; use logs and traces to correlate issues across systems. EMV and Card-Present Processing — EMV flows, certification cycles, TLV/tags, regression across kernel/host changes. eCommerce & Card-Not-Present Processing — Auth/capture/refund/reversal, 3DS, idempotency and failure modes. Authorization Models — Pre-auth, incremental auth, partial capture, card-on-file, lifecycle consistency. Required soft skills: Proactive Ownership: Take initiative to find problems to solve, own projects end-to-end, identify and propose solutions for quality gaps. Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work effectively in fully remote teams, with strong written and verbal English communication skills, comfortable collaborating cross-functionally with internal and external partners. Technical Articulation: Ability to clearly articulate complex technical and quality concepts to diverse audiences. Why Join Peach Payments? Impact: Work on mission-critical payments infrastructure processing millions of transactions. Growth: Be part of a fast-growing company expanding across Africa. Culture: Join a high-performance, diverse, and empathetic team focused on respect for people and merchant success. Flexibility: Remote-first hybrid working - work from anywhere while staying connected to a world-class team. Benefits - Benefits include a generous annual and life leave allocation, market related salaries, owning the piece of the Peach pie through VSOP and more. Be part of our journey to redefine digital payments in Africa! At Peach Payments we value diversity and are committed to inclusion across race, gender, age, religion, identity, and experiences.