Head of Engineering, Payment Gateway

About This Opportunity

We are representing a confidential fintech organization expanding its engineering presence in Poland. Our client processes significant digital payment transaction volume and is building out their payment gateway platform to support multi-currency, international scalability. This is an early leadership hire in Poland—you'll help shape the engineering culture and presence from the ground up.

As Head of Engineering, Payment Gateway, you will own the technical strategy and architecture for an online payment acceptance platform that connects merchants to card networks, banks, and payment aggregators. You'll lead multiple engineering teams through their managers, ensuring platform reliability, security, and developer experience at scale.

Responsibilities

• Own the full technical strategy, architecture, and roadmap for the payment gateway platform across all capability areas
• Lead multiple engineering teams through engineering managers, setting quality standards and building organizational capability
• Own the developer experience end-to-end, including APIs, documentation, SDKs, and integration ease
• Drive platform evolution towards multi-currency and international scalability
• Ensure platform reliability, scalability, and security within a regulated environment
• Partner with product, commercial, and operations teams to align technical investments with business goals
• Hire, mentor, and develop engineering managers and senior engineers to support growth

What We're Looking For

Required Experience:

• Over 10 years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in engineering leadership roles
• 5+ years of hands-on, production-level experience writing and shipping Java code as a practicing engineer—this means years spent writing Java yourself, not only overseeing teams who write it
• At least 5 years of experience managing managers—leading an engineering organization through other engineering leaders, rather than running a single team
• Experience in payments, fintech, or financial services products, with a working understanding of payment flows and compliance
• Deep knowledge of API-first products, developer platforms, and API integration
• Proven leadership of multiple engineering teams via managers in a scaling organization
• Strong backend engineering skills in high-throughput, distributed transactional systems

Preferred:

• Experience building or operating a payment gateway or multi-currency payment platform

Technical Environment:

• Java (latest versions), Spring and Spring Boot
• Docker and Kubernetes
• PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch
• Microservices architecture on AWS

Leadership Qualities:

Our client assesses candidates across eight dimensions: Customer Obsession, Craft, Systemization, Urgency, Ownership, No Ego, Candor, and Integrity. We look for leaders who build deep empathy for users, master fundamentals, move with disciplined speed, put mission first, surface uncomfortable truths early, and maintain ethical consistency.

How We Work With You

When you apply through Get A Job.ai, our talent team will review your background and conduct an initial screening. If there's a strong match, we'll submit your profile to our client and guide you through their interview process, which includes:

• A preliminary phone call with the recruiter
• A panel interview session with two VPs of Engineering
• A technical assessment with the Group CTO
• A behavioral and technical interview with the Group CEO
• A technical workshop with the Group CTO

Please apply exclusively through Get A Job.ai. Do not contact the client directly—we manage all candidate submissions and communications.

Pay

Compensation details will be discussed during the screening process with our recruiting team.

Location: Poland

Get A Job.ai is an equal opportunity recruiter. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive process for all candidates.