Sr. Engineering Manager - Commerce

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Senior Engineering Manager - Commerce based in India.

This role will lead the engineering organization responsible for a large-scale Payments Platform supporting critical commerce experiences. You will own the execution, reliability, and evolution of systems spanning checkout, subscriptions, payment orchestration, invoicing, and financial reconciliation. Working in a highly distributed, remote-first environment, you will combine hands-on technical leadership with people management and strategic execution. You will partner closely with Product, Finance, Infrastructure, Security, Compliance, and other engineering teams to translate business needs into scalable technical solutions. The role offers significant ownership over architecture, operational excellence, delivery predictability, and engineering culture. You will also have the opportunity to build and grow a high-performing team while shaping platforms that operate at substantial global scale.

Accountabilities:

• Lead and Grow the Engineering Team: Build, mentor, and scale a high-performing backend engineering organization while fostering ownership, accountability, continuous learning, and technical excellence. Drive hiring, onboarding, performance management, career development, succession planning, and regular coaching, while strengthening engineering practices through design reviews, technical mentorship, and knowledge sharing.
• Drive Platform Delivery: Own end-to-end execution of the Payments Platform roadmap across multiple concurrent initiatives. Establish predictable delivery through effective planning, estimation, prioritization, sprint management, and delivery reviews, while balancing immediate business priorities with long-term platform investments, technical debt reduction, and reliability improvements.
• Partner Across Functions: Work closely with Product, Finance, Compliance, Customer Success, Infrastructure, Security, and other stakeholders to translate business objectives into actionable technical roadmaps. Communicate architectural decisions, delivery timelines, risks, tradeoffs, and priorities clearly to senior stakeholders and executives.
• Own Reliability and Operational Excellence: Lead engineering efforts for highly available payment infrastructure covering checkout, subscriptions, payment orchestration, invoicing, ledger, and reconciliation services. Establish strong practices around SLOs, error budgets, observability, incident management, disaster recovery, capacity planning, and operational readiness.
• Drive Technical Strategy: Partner with Staff and Principal Engineers to evolve platform architecture and technical direction. Guide decisions involving domain-driven design, API governance, event-driven architectures, service boundaries, data consistency, schema evolution, scalability, maintainability, and operational cost.
• Champion Engineering Excellence: Establish and continuously improve standards for API design, code quality, testing, CI/CD, documentation, security, and operational readiness. Promote engineering excellence through RFCs, ADRs, design reviews, postmortems, continuous improvement initiatives, and developer productivity tooling.
• Strengthen Platform Resilience: Ensure systems are designed around robust distributed-systems principles, including idempotency, retry strategies, circuit breakers, Saga and Outbox patterns, graceful degradation, asynchronous processing, and multi-region failover.

Requirements:

• Engineering Leadership Experience: 12+ years of experience building scalable backend distributed systems, including 5+ years of hands-on experience with Go and 5+ years managing software engineering teams responsible for large-scale backend platforms.
• Distributed Systems Expertise: Proven experience leading teams responsible for business-critical systems with high availability and reliability requirements, with a deep understanding of event-driven architectures, asynchronous messaging, consistency models, idempotency, concurrency control, resilience patterns, and distributed-system design.
• Cloud and Infrastructure Knowledge: Strong experience with Kubernetes/GKE, GCP services such as Pub/Sub, Redis, MongoDB/Firestore, and ClickHouse, as well as CI/CD and cloud-native infrastructure.
• API and Platform Architecture: Strong understanding of API lifecycle management, including protobuf, ConnectRPC/gRPC, versioning strategies, contract testing, schema evolution, service boundaries, and API governance.
• Operational Excellence: Experience establishing and managing SLIs/SLOs, observability practices, incident response, disaster recovery, capacity planning, error budgets, and production-readiness processes.
• Security and Compliance: Familiarity with security and compliance practices relevant to payment platforms, including PCI requirements, secrets management, data governance, privacy controls, and secure infrastructure practices.
• Product and Stakeholder Partnership: Demonstrated ability to work closely with Product Managers and cross-functional stakeholders to define roadmaps, manage competing priorities, align teams, and deliver customer-facing capabilities.
• People Development: Strong track record of hiring, coaching, mentoring, and developing engineering talent, with the ability to build a culture centered on ownership, accountability, continuous improvement, and technical excellence.
• Communication and Influence: Excellent communication skills, including experience presenting technical strategy, architectural decisions, delivery updates, risks, and tradeoffs to senior stakeholders and executive audiences.

Benefits:

• Remote-First Environment: Opportunity to work within a global, distributed organization with teams operating across multiple countries.
• High-Impact Technical Scope: Significant ownership over payment infrastructure and commerce capabilities operating at substantial scale.
• Leadership and Growth: Opportunity to build and develop a high-performing engineering organization while shaping engineering culture and technical direction.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Close partnership with Product, Finance, Infrastructure, Security, Compliance, Support, and other engineering teams.
• Technical Ownership: Broad influence over architecture, reliability, engineering standards, platform evolution, and long-term technical investments.
• Continuous Learning: An environment that encourages technical mentorship, knowledge sharing, design reviews, experimentation, and continuous improvement.