Engineering Manager

At PPRO, we simplify access to local payments - providing a local payments platform that empowers giants like PayPal, Stripe, and Microsoft to connect with billions of consumers worldwide. We are on an ambitious, fast-paced mission to 3x our growth by 2028 - and we're just getting started. Our magic lies in our team of proud payments nerds. Spanning over 50 nationalities across 10+ global locations, our diverse cultures aren't a checklist; they are the competitive advantage driving our innovation. This is a people-first, high trust environment where you'll have the autonomy to make a massive impact, own your work end-to-end, and grow through broad exposure, meaningful challenges, and continuous learning. We get things done, challenge respectfully, put the customer first, and recognise that our biggest successes are those we create as a team. If you're ready to leave your footprint on global commerce, join us.

The Purpose:

Engineering Managers at PPRO build collaborative teams that ship high-quality, scalable and resilient products. In Transaction Processing, we run the payment gateway and the APIs at the heart of PPRO. Every payment our merchants and partners send goes through the systems you'll own.

Think of yourself as the hands-on "mini-CTO" of the platform every other PPRO domain depends on. You'll set direction across the gateway and API layer, grow the people who lead it and make calls that shape how PPRO processes payments for years to come.

Responsibilities include:

• Partner with Product to turn ambiguous, multi-quarter goals into a technology strategy and roadmap for the gateway and API layer, with clear milestones and cross-team dependencies managed early
• Grow our APIs into the best way to integrate with PPRO, including taking over APIs from other domains and onboarding new partners and payment types (from local payment methods to stablecoins)
• Run several critical initiatives at once, own their risks and make quick reprioritisation calls when the business needs it
• Build an architecture culture across the platform: shared patterns, reusable libraries and clear domain boundaries, designed for availability, idempotency, scale, disaster recovery and Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance at the edge
• Stay hands-on: review designs and pull requests, pair with engineers and use AI tools well (and know when not to trust them)
• Lead, coach and grow engineers and Staff-level technical leaders. Hire as the API scope grows, raise the hiring bar and develop the next generation of technical and people leaders
• Own operational excellence for the whole platform: SLOs and error budgets, observability and testing standards, incident leadership (including communication with senior stakeholders and customers), business continuity planning and cloud spend within budget
• Work across domains like Billing, Reconciliation, Disputes, Merchant Boarding and Technical Operations, and mediate priorities between Engineering, Product and Partnerships. You'll influence where you don't have direct authority, using clear, data-backed reasoning
• Represent the platform to senior leadership and help shape priorities beyond your own team
• Create a team where people feel safe to challenge, give candid feedback to peers and managers, and learn from what doesn't work

What would make you a great fit:

• Experience leading engineering teams with broad platform scope, ideally working with Staff Engineers or tech leads (managing more than one team is a strong plus)
• A track record of delivering complex, multi-quarter technical programmes with high uncertainty and many cross-team dependencies
• Deep experience designing and running high-availability distributed systems or public APIs at scale, using Java and Spring Boot
• Strong experience with AWS, Docker, Kubernetes and Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform)
• A strong operational mindset: SLOs, observability, incident management, testing strategy and cost awareness
• Experience hiring, developing and growing high-performing, diverse teams, with evidence you've helped people step up a level
• The ability to explain technical trade-offs to engineers, product partners and senior leaders alike, in writing and in the room
• A humble, inclusive leadership style, plus a pragmatic, results-oriented approach and a drive to keep improving
• A desire to spend around 40% of your time close to the code and architecture
• Hands-on experience using generative AI in engineering work, and a view on where it helps and where it doesn't
• Payments or fintech experience (nice to have): payment gateways, Payment Service Provider (PSP) or acquirer integrations, PCI DSS, idempotency or reconciliation
• Event-driven architectures (nice to have)
• Working proficiency in English

Tech stack:

• Java a