Engineering Manager

About Payfinia:

Payfinia is a SaaS payment hub powering community banks and credit unions across the United States. Our flagship product, IPX (Instant Payment Exchange), enables real-time payment processing across major payment rails including FedNow and RTP. We build secure, scalable, cloud-native financial infrastructure that empowers smaller financial institutions to compete at the highest level.

We are a fast-growing engineering organization with deep roots in AWS, microservices, and payment compliance. We are looking for a seasoned Engineering Manager to join our leadership team at our India development center.

Role Overview:

We are looking for an Engineering Manager based in India who is as comfortable reviewing a system design as they are running a sprint planning session. You will lead one of our core engineering teams, take full ownership of feature delivery, and work closely with Product, QA, and DevOps as well as our US-based leadership, client teams, and financial institution partners.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will operate through 2-3 tech leads and senior engineers while personally engaging in architecture reviews, critical-path technical decisions, and AI-SDLC adoption not just managing timelines. You will be expected to drive autonomous decision-making during India business hours and maintain proactive communication across a 10-15 hour time zone gap.

Key Responsibilities:

People & Team Leadership:

- Lead, mentor, and grow a team of 10-15 engineers across Java, Node.js, and React.js stacks, operating through 2-3 tech leads.

- Conduct regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and career development conversations.

- Drive hiring own technical interviews and build a high-quality engineering pipeline.

- Foster a culture of ownership, continuous learning, engineering pride, and AI-augmented productivity.

- Manage and coordinate with QA team, and external contractors.

Technical Leadership:

- Actively participate in architecture, design, and code reviews across the stack.

- Make or guide key technical decisions on microservices design, API contracts, data modeling, and integration patterns.

- Ensure adherence to engineering best practices: code quality, security-by-design, observability, and documentation.

- Own technical quality gates for multi-tenant SaaS releases.

AI-SDLC Leadership:

- AI-Assisted Development - Drive adoption of AI coding tools (GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalents) across the team; establish usage guidelines, measure productivity impact, and share best practices.

- AI Across the SDLC - Integrate AI into the full development lifecycle: AI-driven test case generation, automated code review augmentation, design document drafting, incident root-cause analysis, and documentation generation.

- Measurement & Governance - Define and track AI productivity metrics (AI-assisted code coverage, review cycle time reduction, defect escape rates); ensure AI tooling usage complies with PCI-DSS, SOC 2, and data residency requirements; establish prompt engineering standards and reusable context libraries for the team.

Delivery & Execution:

- Own the end-to-end delivery lifecycle for your team's domain - from planning and sprint execution to production deployment and post-go-live support.

- Collaborate with Product Managers to refine requirements, estimate effort, and translate roadmap into executable plans.

- Drive risk identification and mitigation - proactively surface blockers and manage dependencies across teams.

- Support multi-tenant SaaS releases including customer onboarding, integration certification, and go-live events.

- Own deployment frequency, lead time, and change failure rate improvements for your team's domain.

Security & Compliance:

- Participate in threat modeling and secure SDLC practices for payment processing workflows.

- Ensure team adherence to PCI-DSS, SOC 2 compliance requirements as operational realities, not checkboxes.

- Support security incident response - coordinate remediation, produce root-cause analyses, and drive hardening initiatives.

- Maintain audit-ready engineering practices: code review documentation, change management records, access control hygiene.

Stakeholder & Client Engagement:

- Represent engineering in scoping, discovery, and integration discussions with US-based financial institution partners and third-party vendors (expect periodic evening IST calls).

- Maintain clear, proactive communication with internal and external stakeholders across time zones default to over-communication given the distributed model.

- Provide regular engineering status, risk, and delivery updates to US-based leadership without requiring prompting.

Required Qualifications:

Experience:

- 12+ years of total software engineering experience, with at least 1-2 years in an Engineering Manager or Tech Lead Manager role.

- Proven experience leading multi-disciplinary engineering teams (10+) in a SaaS or product-based environment.

- Strong background in full-stack development hands-on expertise across at least two of: Node.js, React.js, Java/Spring Boot.

- Experience managing distributed/remote teams across time zones, including vendor and contractor coordination.

- Demonstrated experience adopting AI development tools and driving engineering productivity improvements.

Technical Skills:

- Node.js REST API design, async/event-driven patterns, Express/Fastify, NPM ecosystem.

- React.js Component architecture, state management (Redux/Zustand/Context), modern hooks, performance optimization.

- Java / Spring Boot Microservices, Spring MVC, JPA/Hibernate, Maven/Gradle, multi-threading.

- Cloud & Infrastructure AWS (EKS, RDS, API Gateway, Lambda, SQS/SNS, KMS, or equivalents), Docker, Kubernetes.

- Databases PostgreSQL/MySQL (relational modeling, query optimization), Redis (caching, pub/sub).

- API Security OAuth 2.0, JWT, mTLS, API Gateway patterns, WAF concepts.

- CI/CD & DevOps GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or similar pipelines; familiarity with GitOps principles.

- AI Development Tools Working proficiency with at least one AI coding assistant (Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor); understanding of LLM capabilities and limitations in software engineering workflows.

Domain Knowledge (Strongly Preferred):

- Experience in fintech, banking, or payment systems understanding of payment rails (ACH, FedNow, RTP, Wire) and payment message lifecycles.

- Familiarity with PCI-DSS, SOC 2, or other financial compliance/security frameworks.

- Exposure to IBM MQ, Salesforce, core banking systems (Symitar, Corelation, DNA, XP2), or multi-tenant FI onboarding patterns.

Soft Skills:

- Strong communication skills able to translate complex technical topics for non-technical stakeholders and communicate clearly in writing.

- High ownership mindset with a bias for action and autonomous decision-making.

- Comfortable operating in ambiguity and driving clarity in a fast-paced, distributed environment.

- Collaborative leader who can balance empathy with accountability.

- Proactive communicator who defaults to transparency doesn't wait to be asked for updates.

Skills

Java Architect, IT Product Development, Technical Architect