AWS announced the launch of AWS Payment Cryptography this week, and I’ve had the opportunity to lead the service from its earliest definition through production launch. The official AWS announcement is here: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/06/aws-payment-cryptography/.
This was one of those projects where the hard part was never just building software. The challenge was defining a service that could meet the expectations of payment processors, issuers, and financial institutions who were used to a vastly different interaction model while operating inside the security, compliance, and operational standards required for payment cryptography.
My role started at the beginning: taking early customer input, writing the initial business requirements, and helping shape the architecture that would eventually become the service. That meant defining the threat model, establishing the security posture, and making early decisions around control-plane boundaries, data-plane design, hardware integration, and how HSM-backed infrastructure would operate inside AWS.
I also led the evaluation and selection of the HSM platform itself. That work involved deep vendor evaluation of the big three payment HSM vendors, prototype testing, operational modeling, and understanding what would actually work for a managed cloud service rather than simply replicating traditional on-premises approaches.
As the service moved toward launch, a major focus became operational discipline. Observability, operational reviews, and HSM fleet health management were critical to making sure the system would hold up under real customer use, not just pass a design review. Several of the hardware-backed design patterns established during this work are already proving useful beyond this single service.
Launching AWS Payment Cryptography has been one of the most meaningful things I’ve worked on. It was a rare opportunity to help build something from ambiguity to durable production, where architecture, security, and execution all had to hold together at the same time.