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