To hire developers with experience building payment processing systems, look for hands-on backgrounds in PCI-DSS compliance, tokenization, and secure API integrations, and use platforms like Trio to connect with engineers who have built similar fintech products rather than those who have only worked adjacent to payments.
In interviews, ask candidates to walk through a payment flow they have built end-to-end. Strong candidates can speak to how they handled card data tokenization, how they structured API authentication, and how they approached PCI scope reduction. If someone has helped a product achieve PCI certification or worked through a QSA assessment, that experience tends to indicate a deeper level of involvement than most.
Watch for candidates who describe payment experience at a product level rather than an infrastructure level. Understanding how a payment works as a user differs considerably from understanding how to build the system that processes it securely at scale.