Sr. Engineering Manager

We are looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead high-performing teams within Flipkart's Fintech and Payments Engineering Group. You will shape the strategy, execution, reliability, and evolution of products and platforms that span mission-critical payment systems, financial products, and fraud and risk platforms directly impacting hundreds of millions of Indians transacting on Flipkart every day. The role goes beyond engineering delivery. We are looking for a hands-on technology leader who can build high-performing teams, influence product strategy, drive technical excellence, and create products and platforms that are resilient, scalable, secure, AI-enabled, and built for hyper-growth. You will solve challenges at a scale very few engineering teams in India face. Every architectural decision you make directly impacts hundreds of millions of customers. You will work with some of the sharpest fintech engineers in the country and partner closely with innovative product and business leaders in building financial products and payments infrastructure.

We are looking for an engineering leader who combines deep technical expertise with strong product development, operational excellence, and exceptional people leadership skills. As a Senior Engineering Manager, you will be responsible for building highly available, scalable, and secure fintech and payment products while growing engineering teams

The core responsibilities for the job include the following:

Technical Leadership:

• Drive architecture, design, and implementation of highly scalable services primarily using Java and modern cloud-native technologies.
• Demonstrate deep understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, databases, caches, message brokers, streaming platforms, API-first and event-driven architectures.
• Establish engineering standards around code quality, architecture reviews, performance engineering, observability, security, and maintainability. Drive platform modernisation, technical debt reduction, and reusable engineering capabilities across teams.
• Design systems with regulatory compliance, security, and customer trust as foundational principles, not afterthoughts.

Operational Excellence and Engineering:

• Discipline Own the operational health, reliability, and resilience of mission-critical payment platforms.
• Build engineering organisations that treat reliability and security as product features, not operational overhead.
• Establish data-driven operational reviews and continuously improve platform reliability, deployment velocity, and service quality.
• Own end-to-end execution for strategic engineering initiatives from concept through production.
• Deliver predictable outcomes while balancing innovation, technical debt, and operational commitments.
• Improve engineering productivity through standardised development practices, automation, and continuous improvement.
• Measure success through engineering and business metrics: delivery predictability, platform reliability, customer impact, engineering velocity, and team health.

AI-Native Mindset:

• Champion the adoption of AI across the software development lifecycle and engineering operations.
• Encourage teams to rethink traditional software development practices through AI-first approaches, not merely incremental automation.
• Stay current with emerging AI technologies and continuously evaluate opportunities to improve engineering effectiveness and product capabilities.
• Leverage AI to fundamentally accelerate engineering productivity, code quality, and software delivery.

Business and Product Stakeholder Management:

• Partner closely with product and business teams to translate strategy into scalable technology solutions.
• Influence product roadmap by bringing strong technical judgement, platform thinking, and deep customer empathy.
• Evaluate platform investments through the lens of customer experience, payment success rates, operational efficiency, and business outcomes.
• Drive engineering prioritisation using business impact, customer value, and operational considerations.
• Balance speed of execution with long-term architectural sustainability.
• Communicate complex technical concepts effectively to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Build trusted partnerships across cross-functional teams to deliver strategic initiatives.

Team Leadership and Culture:

• Build, mentor, and grow high-performing engineering.
• Hire exceptional talent and create a strong leadership pipeline through coaching, mentoring, and succession planning.
• Raise the engineering bar through high standards for technical excellence, execution quality, and operational rigour.
• Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, continuous learning, and customer obsession.
• Create an inclusive, collaborative environment where diverse perspectives are valued and engineers are empowered to do their best work.
• Drive regular performance feedback, career development, and growth opportunities for engineers and managers.
• Lead organisational change effectively while maintaining high team engagement and morale.

Responsibilities:

• Build scalable, resilient, and secure distributed systems that operate reliably at high scale.
• Apply deep fintech and payments expertise to solve complex customer and business problems.
• Influence product direction through technical leadership and business acumen.
• Leverage AI to fundamentally improve engineering productivity and software delivery.
• Build exceptional engineering organisations by developing leaders, raising technical standards, and fostering a culture of ownership, innovation, and continuous improvement.

Requirements:

• 12+ years of polyglot engineering experience, with at least 3 years building payment or fintech products.
• Strong system design skills and the ability to guide architecture decisions for complex, multi-system payment workflows.
• Experience designing and operating high-availability and low-latency systems (99.99%+) where failures have direct financial and customer-trust consequences.
• Hands-on experience with one or more payment systems: payment gateways, UPI integrations, card payment flows, wallet infrastructure, loan origination systems, settlement and reconciliation systems, etc.
• Understanding of the Indian payments and fintech regulatory landscape: RBI, NPCI guidelines, PPI regulations, and PCI-DSS requirements.
• Proven track record of building and growing engineering teams; ability to hire strong engineers and develop them into senior contributors.
• BE/BTech in computer science or equivalent.

Nice to Have:

• Familiarity with TPAP (Third-Party Application Provider) architecture on the NPCI UPI stack.
• Experience in card processing authentication, authorisation, clearing, and settlement flows; working knowledge of card scheme rules and interchange economics.
• Understanding of credit risk scoring, credit bureau integrations (CIBIL, Experian, CRIF), or credit lifecycle management for consumer/business lending.
• Exposure to real-time fraud and risk ML models and their integration into payment decisioning pipelines.
• Participation in fintech/payments industry forums or working groups.

Skills

PCI-DSS, UPI, architecture, distributed systems, fintech, high availability, java, low latency, payment gateways, payments, system design