Engineering Lead

What you'll do

• Lead, mentor, and grow a cross-functional engineering team spanning backend, frontend, mobile, and QA, with a strong emphasis on culture, code quality, and accountability
• Own end-to-end the platform's external-integration delivery, including API contract design, cross-cloud networking, webhook reliability, and pilot rollout
• Drive the post-handover hardening of the stack, including security baseline, compliance re-certification readiness, deploy pipeline codification, and operational visibility
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, operations, compliance, and the upstream payment ecosystem to ship high-impact features and protect existing partner contracts
• Guide and mentor mid-level and senior engineers, providing technical leadership through code reviews, design discussions, architecture reviews, and pairing sessions
• Lead by example in enforcing clean architecture, clear documentation, and reliable observability practices across the team
• Identify and resolve organisational, technical, and process bottlenecks; improve team velocity, system resilience, and engineering metrics that matter
• Stay up to date with emerging technologies, hiring-market dynamics, and engineering management practices; propose improvements aligned with business goals
• Build engineering capability with security and compliance in mind, ensuring proper access control, audit trails, and PCI-DSS / ISO 27001 awareness across the team
• Hire alongside the Head of Engineering — set the technical bar, define interview rubrics, run debriefs, and own offer decisions across the engineering team

What you should have

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field.
• 8+ years engineering experience including 3+ years leading engineering teams.
• Has led an engineering team of five to fifteen ICs at a payments, fintech, or banking platform company.
• Has owned a payments, fintech, or banking platform team through compliance work (PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, or local equivalent).
• Strong backend depth — Python and Django preferred given the platform stack, or comparable production-language depth that lets you read and review Django without friction.
• Comfortable across the full stack — backend, frontend (Angular), mobile (Flutter), and infrastructure (GCP).
• Payment domain fluency — scheme, acquirer, and processor model; 3DS, settlement, refund, payout, webhook reliability, idempotency, reconciliation patterns.
• Deep security and compliance grounding — PCI-DSS scope reduction, KMS-backed encryption, audit-trail design, secret hygiene, OWASP-aware engineering.
• Cloud infrastructure on GCP (AWS acceptable); IaC familiarity; container and CI/CD pipeline ownership at the team level.
• Clear written and verbal communication in English; writes design documents, RFCs, and incident post-mortems.
• High agency on ambiguity; pragmatic on technical-debt vs delivery trade-offs.
• Has owned incidents end-to-end and modelled on-call accountability for a team.