Engineering Manager (Payments)

Company: Spectrum Search

Spectrum Search is partnered with a growth-stage financial technology company building modern payment and card infrastructure for businesses globally. This opportunity offers the chance to lead the expansion of a commercial card platform into new international markets, combining engineering leadership with complex technical delivery across regulated financial services.
About the opportunity
The company is expanding its card issuing capabilities across multiple regions and is seeking an experienced Engineering Manager to lead the engineering delivery of new market launches. Working closely with product, compliance, infrastructure and engineering teams, this role combines hands-on technical leadership with cross-functional programme delivery.
This is a high-impact opportunity for someone who enjoys solving complex engineering challenges while building scalable, reliable financial infrastructure across multiple regulatory environments.
The role
* Lead engineering delivery for card programme expansion across North America, EMEA and Latin America
* Shape engineering strategy and contribute to technical design decisions
* Coordinate delivery across multiple engineering and business teams to ensure successful market launches
* Translate regulatory and operational requirements into well-defined engineering initiatives
* Drive platform reliability, operational excellence and long-term scalability
* Support ongoing enhancement of the core card platform alongside expansion initiatives
Key responsibilities
* Lead engineering workstreams for market localisation, regulatory integration and processor connectivity
* Work with product, legal and compliance teams to define technical solutions for regional requirements
* Coordinate engineering delivery across platform, payments, onboarding, compliance, infrastructure, data and security teams
* Manage delivery plans, dependencies, risks and stakeholder communication
* Establish operational readiness through monitoring, incident management, runbooks and service level objectives
* Improve platform performance by analysing production issues including transaction failures, reconciliation and operational incidents
* Promote reusable engineering solutions that strengthen the core platform rather than market-specific implementations
* Foster high engineering standards through technical leadership, collaboration and code quality
Essential requirements
* Proven experience leading software engineering teams within financial technology or regulated payment environments
* Strong background building production systems involving payments, card infrastructure, fraud or risk platforms, financial reconciliation or API platforms
* Demonstrated ability to lead complex cross-functional engineering programmes and architectural decision-making
* Strong understanding of scalable, fault-tolerant and observable distributed systems
* Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills
* Experience maintaining high standards for engineering quality, reliability and peer review
* Strong engineering fundamentals with experience in technologies such as TypeScript, Node.js, NestJS and AWS, or comparable modern backend technology stacks
Nice-to-haves
* Experience with card issuing, Visa or Mastercard ecosystems and card lifecycle management
* Knowledge of PCI compliance, tokenisation, 3DS and digital wallets
* Experience integrating with issuer processors and regulated financial partners
* Familiarity with observability platforms such as New Relic, Datadog or OpenTelemetry
* Experience with CI/CD automation
* Understanding of financial regulations including PSD2, GDPR, open banking or comparable regulatory frameworks
* Experience using AI or LLM-assisted development tools
Location and remote setup
Fully remote role within a globally distributed engineering team. Collaboration across international time zones will be required.

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