Engineering Manager

Engineering Manager

About the Role

We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to lead engineering team in building and scaling payment infrastructure for the high-risk market. This role combines technical leadership in payment systems, people management, and delivery ownership. You’ll be the bridge between engineering, product, risk, compliance, and business — ensuring our platform is secure, fast, and scalable.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership

• Drive payment gateway architecture: microservices vs monolith trade-offs, event-driven design, transaction processing pipelines

• Lead the design and evolution of core payment modules: checkout, payment routing, settlement, reconciliation, chargeback handling, refund engine

• Review technical designs for fraud detection, risk scoring, 3DS authentication flows, and tokenization

• Ensure the platform meets PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, and card network compliance standards (Visa/Mastercard)

• Lead incident response for production issues — payment downtime means direct revenue loss, so MTTR is a top priority

• Evaluate and introduce new technologies (queue systems, observability stack, ML for fraud) when there’s clear business value

Team & People Management

• Lead the engineering team — currently around 20 people, with plans to scale

• Conduct regular 1-on-1s, OKR/performance reviews, and career development planning

• Hire, onboard, and retain talent — especially engineers with appetite for payment/fintech complexity

• Build a culture of ownership, accountability, and engineering excellence

• Handle performance issues, team conflicts, and resource allocation with empathy and decisiveness

Delivery & Execution

• Own the full SDLC: from roadmap planning to post-release monitoring

• Partner with Product Managers to translate business needs into technical roadmaps

• Drive sprint planning, estimation, and delivery cadence — balancing feature velocity, tech debt, and stability

• Ensure on-time delivery without compromising security and compliance

• Track engineering KPIs: deployment frequency, uptime (target 99.95%+), MTTR, transaction success rate, fraud false-positive rate

Risk, Compliance & Cross-functional

• Collaborate closely with Risk, Compliance, and Operations teams to support merchant onboarding (KYB), transaction monitoring, and AML reporting

• Bridge between engineering and card networks/acquirers on integration, certification, and dispute resolution

• Communicate technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders (CEO, Risk, Sales)

• Represent engineering in strategic discussions — especially when entering new high-risk verticals (e.g., iGaming, crypto)

Requirements

Must Have — Technical

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with 2+ years in a leadership/EM role

• Strong understanding of microservices and monolith architectures — when to use each, and how to migrate

• Hands-on proficiency in Golang (preferred for critical services), JavaScript/TypeScript (Node.js backend + frontend), and PHP (legacy/existing systems)

• Deep experience with PostgreSQL (query optimization, indexing, partitioning, transaction isolation levels) and Redis (caching, rate limiting, pub/sub, distributed locks)

• Mastery of the full SDLC: requirement gathering, design, development, testing (unit/integration/E2E), CI/CD, deployment, monitoring, post-mortem

• Experience with distributed systems: message queues (RabbitMQ/Kafka), idempotency, eventual consistency, saga pattern, distributed transactions

• Familiar with API design (REST, gRPC, webhooks), API versioning, and rate limiting

• Solid grasp of security: PCI-DSS scope, tokenization, encryption at-rest/in-transit, secret management, OWASP Top 10

Must Have — Payment Domain

• Experience or strong understanding of payment gateway / payment processing: card processing, virtual accounts, e-wallets, direct debit, alternative payment methods

• Familiar with concepts: authorization, capture, settlement, reconciliation, chargeback, refund, void

• Understanding of 3DS 1.0/2.x flows, EMVCo standards, and card network integration (Visa/Mastercard/JCB/Amex)

• Knowledge of fraud detection: rule-based vs ML-based, velocity checks, device fingerprinting, AVS/CVV

Must Have — Leadership

• Track record of leading engineering teams of 5+ people

• Experience in hiring, performance management, and people development

• Strong communication skills in English (verbal and written)

• Data-driven decision-making and structured problem-solving

• Comfortable in fast-paced environments with high ambiguity

Nice to Have

• Direct experience in high-risk payment processing (iGaming, forex, crypto, adult, nutraceuticals, etc.)

• Hands-on experience with PCI-DSS audits and compliance certification

• Familiar with international payment regulations and AML frameworks (FATF, FinCEN, etc.)

• Experience building fraud/risk engines or integrating third-party tools (Sift, Forter, Riskified, Sardine)

• Background in multi-acquirer routing, smart routing, or payment orchestration

• Familiar with observability stack (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK, Sentry)

• Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), Kubernetes, Terraform

• Open-source contributions or active in technical community

What We Offer

• Opportunity to build payment infrastructure for an underserved market (high-risk)

• Technical and strategic ownership of the product

• A solid, ambitious, and technically strong team

• Competitive compensation and benefits

• Clear growth path as the company scales