Director of Engineering, Payments

As Director of Payments Engineering, you will lead Engineering teams and Staff Engineers across the payments domains, supporting their technical decision-making processes. You will spearhead initiatives that traverse multiple teams and domains, such as those focused on global scalability, transaction transparency, and payment optimisation. You will own payments architecture strategy and drive the long-term vision for how payment systems should be architected, integrated, and scaled.

What you'll do

• Lead three engineering squads comprising 20-25 engineers, managing Engineering Managers and Staff Engineers across Warsaw and Berlin.
• Own the GenAI transformation of the Payments Tribe — define and drive a concrete roadmap for becoming a genuinely AI-native engineering organisation.
• Own the availability and reliability of HelloFresh's payment infrastructure — drive SRE practices, incident management, SLOs/SLIs, and on-call maturity across high-throughput systems serving multiple markets.
• Set technical direction across Golang, Kotlin, PostgreSQL, Kafka, React, and React Native services on AWS, ensuring systems meet regulatory and compliance requirements.
• Partner with Product, Finance, the Growth tribe, and payment service providers to align engineering priorities with business outcomes.
• Manage, coach, and develop Engineering Managers — holding them accountable for team health, delivery, and engineering standards.

What you'll need

• Hands-on familiarity with AI technologies and a demonstrable track record of championing their adoption.
• Mastery of payment processing, gateway services, batch transaction processing, payment reporting, database systems, distributed computing, and backend development frameworks. Hands-on familiarity with Golang, Kotlin, PostgreSQL, Kafka, and AWS.
• The ability to understand complex systems holistically and leverage this to design scalable, resilient solutions in a high-throughput environment.
• 10+ years in software engineering with 4+ years managing Engineering Managers — demonstrated ability to lead distributed teams across multiple offices.
• Strong grounding in SRE practices — SLOs/SLIs, incident management, on-call culture, and observability tooling. Experience owning payments infrastructure in regulated, multi-market environments is a strong plus.
• Exceptional ability to work across engineering disciplines, Product, Finance, and external payment service providers.
• Strong ability to articulate complex technical concepts clearly to diverse audiences.

What they offer

• Play a key role in transforming how millions of people eat as we grow into a global food solutions company.
• Make decisions with direct and immediate impact, helping to shape strategy, scale teams, and redefine leadership.
• Compensation heavily weighted toward equity through Virtual Stock Option (VSO) and Restricted Stock Unit (RSU) plans.
• Work with ambitious, intellectually curious peers on a global scale in a high-performance environment.
• Discount on HelloFresh meal kits and company pension scheme.