Director - Engineering - Payment Solutions (18-25 yrs)

About the Role:

As the Director of Engineering, you will lead and inspire a team of talented engineers and engineering managers across Development and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). You will be responsible for driving the design, development, deployment, and reliability of our scalable, secure, and high-performing software solutions built on .NET / C#. You will work closely with product management, design, customer success, and other cross-functional teams to align engineering efforts with business objectives, ensuring our products meet and exceed customer expectations. Additionally, you will define and execute the technical vision that supports both the immediate growth and long-term success of our product offerings while fostering a culture of engineering excellence, collaboration, and empowerment.

Responsibilities:

Strategic Leadership & Technical Vision:

- Collaborate with senior leadership and product teams to define the product, technical strategy, and roadmap, ensuring alignment with business objectives.

- Balance short-term deliverables with long-term strategic initiatives, fostering innovation while maintaining operational stability.

Development & Architecture:

- Ensure system architecture and design emphasize scalability, high availability, security, and performance.

- Promote best practices in software development, DevOps, and cloud-native architectures within the .NET / C# ecosystem.

- Drive the adoption of modern engineering practices such as CI/CD, automated testing, microservices, and cloud-native development.

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE):

- Establish and lead an SRE function, ensuring application and infrastructure reliability, availability, and performance.

- Define and implement SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs to measure and improve system reliability and customer experience.

- Enhance observability, monitoring, alerting, and incident management processes to maintain high system uptime.

- Promote a culture of proactive performance tuning, failure analysis, and chaos engineering to improve resiliency.

Team Leadership & Culture:

- Provide strategic leadership and guidance to multiple engineering teams, fostering a culture of trust, innovation, and accountability.

- Build and mentor a high-performing engineering team, attracting top talent and developing leaders.

- Drive engagement, morale, and productivity by implementing best practices in team management and creating a collaborative and inclusive work environment.

Execution & Delivery:

- Lead the planning, execution, and delivery of key engineering projects, balancing resource allocation and timelines.

- Ensure quality and security are embedded throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

- Partner with security teams to ensure compliance with data protection and cybersecurity best practices.

Customer-Centric Innovation:

- Regularly engage with customers and customer-facing teams to understand pain points and drive data-driven decisions to enhance functionality and usability.

- Advocate for a customer-first approach in engineering, ensuring reliability and ease of use are prioritized.

Cross-Functional Collaboration:

- Partner with Product Management, Operations, and Customer Support to align engineering efforts with business goals.

- Communicate strategy, plans, and progress effectively to stakeholders, customers, and senior leadership.

Qualifications:

Experience:

- 20+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 5 years in a leadership role managing development and/or reliability engineering teams.

- Strong experience in building scalable enterprise applications using .NET / C#.

- Experience leading both Development and SRE teams is a strong plus.

- Experience in automation, process orchestration, and integration is preferred.

Technical Expertise:

- Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure (Azure preferred) and microservices architecture.

- Experience in CI/CD pipelines, DevOps, and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools.

- Knowledge of observability, monitoring, and incident management best practices.

- Strong grasp of database technologies, API design, and distributed systems.

Leadership & Execution:

- Proven track record of building and leading high-performing engineering teams.

- Ability to drive system reliability improvements while fostering a culture of accountability.

- Strong organizational and project management skills, with the ability to balance multiple priorities.

Culture & Communication:

- Ability to collaborate effectively across teams and communicate technical vision to non-technical stakeholders.

- Experience managing distributed teams across multiple locations.

- Willingness to travel occasionally to foster team cohesion and drive alignment