Senior Engineering Manager

PayJoy's Spend team builds the infrastructure that enables customers to use their credit, from payment and disbursement methods to payment processor integrations and the full credit card lifecycle.

As a Senior Engineering Manager, Spend, you will lead and grow a distributed team of engineers, driving technical excellence, operational reliability, and predictable delivery. You will work closely with Product, Risk, Compliance, Finance, and other Engineering teams to build and scale reliable, secure, and cost-efficient financial infrastructure across multiple markets.

This role is ideal for an experienced engineering leader who combines strong technical judgment with a people-first management approach. You will empower engineers to own technical decisions, develop high-performing teams, and establish effective engineering practices that support PayJoy's continued growth.

What You'll Do

• Lead and develop a high-performing engineering team: Coach and mentor engineers, support career development, conduct performance reviews, and build a culture of accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Build and scale the team: Partner with Talent Acquisition to recruit, assess, and retain exceptional engineering talent through structured interviews and effective hiring practices.
• Drive technical excellence: Establish and maintain high standards for software architecture, code quality, testing, security, observability, and engineering practices across payment integrations and financial infrastructure.
• Own operational reliability: Ensure services are highly available and resilient by driving effective incident management, healthy on-call practices, post-incident reviews, and continuous reliability improvements.
• Shape the engineering roadmap: Partner with Product and engineering leadership to define priorities, plan projects, establish OKRs, and balance feature delivery with technical debt, infrastructure investments, and system health.
• Enable financial infrastructure at scale: Work with Risk, Compliance, Finance, payment processors, and card issuers to deliver secure, compliant, and cost-efficient solutions across markets.
• Improve engineering effectiveness: Evaluate team processes, remove technical and organizational blockers, and introduce practices that improve delivery speed, quality, and predictability.
• Provide technical leadership: Guide architectural discussions, review technical proposals, and help the team navigate complex engineering trade-offs while fostering autonomy and ownership.

What We're Looking For

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 12+ years of experience in software engineering, infrastructure, platform engineering, or a related technical field.
• 4+ years of engineering management experience, leading and developing high-performing engineering teams.
• Proven experience building, operating, and scaling highly available, reliable, and secure systems.
• Strong backend engineering experience, including SQL and database-driven applications.
• Experience with distributed systems, software architecture, networking, databases, security, observability, and production operations.
• Strong understanding of DevOps practices, CI/CD, automated testing, and infrastructure reliability.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, preferably AWS, and technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes, and YAML-based configuration.
• Ability to balance technical depth with people leadership, strategic planning, and operational execution.
• Demonstrated ability to make sound technical decisions, communicate trade-offs, and influence stakeholders across engineering and business teams.
• Experience implementing and improving agile development practices.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills (Spanish And English)

Nice to Have

• Experience in fintech, banking, payments, or other financial services.
• Familiarity with payment processors, payment disbursements, merchant integrations, financial reconciliation, or banking partnerships.
• Experience working with credit cards and their associated infrastructure, including issuance, fulfillment, and lifecycle management.
• Experience with PHP.
• Familiarity with Django or Kotlin.

Benefits

• 100% Company-funded Health for employees and immediate family members
• Life Insurance
• Indefinite-term contract
• 20 days of vacations, unlimited sick leave
• $2,000 USD annual Co-working Travel perk
• $2,000 USD annual Professional Development perk
• Phone finance, headphone benefit, home office equipment allowance and wellness perks
• Catered lunches