Engineering Manager

PayAU; City of Melbourne; On-site; AUD 170,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

PayAU in Melbourne is seeking an Engineering Manager for the PayRewards squad, building a platform that turns US invoices into rewards. The role sits in Melbourne with the US team, leading a growing engineering group and shaping the roadmap.

You will balance shipping velocity with platform health, mentor engineers across time zones, and drive adoption of AI tooling to reduce costs and accelerate delivery. The ideal candidate has fintech/payments experience and a track record of scaling teams.

Qualifications

• Shipped software and collaborated with tech leads on design and quality.
• Redesigned an engineering team's workflow and measured impact.
• Hands-on with AI tooling to improve team efficiency.
• Managed engineers and stakeholders across multiple time zones.
• Experience in fintech/payments or regulated domains.
• Familiar with DORA-like delivery metrics and scaling companies.

Responsibilities

• Maintain throughput and predictability to keep the squad shipping.
• Prioritize work and challenge stakeholders on what earns a slot.
• Balance platform health with new features and roadmap delivery.
• Embed AI tooling into the workflow to reduce manual effort.
• Grow and mentor engineers to become capable leads.
• Reduce support load by addressing root causes and bottlenecks.

Skills

Shipped software

AI tooling

Cross-timezone work

Stakeholder management

Fintech/payments experience

Scaling teams

Job description

About us:

pay.com.au is one of Australia’s fastest-growing technology scale-ups, trusted by businesses across the country. Since 2019, we’ve been transforming business payments by enabling companies from sole traders to large enterprises to pay by credit card and earn rewards on every transaction.

We’re now taking that same idea to the US, under our PayRewards brand. Australian company, American product: US businesses pay their vendors and bills by card and earn rewards on money they were already spending including points that move into airline programs. Invoices and bills that never earned anything before now do.

We’re still early days in the US, which is exactly what makes it exciting. This year is about bringing a lot more American small businesses onto the platform, cutting what it costs to win each one down to a fraction of what it is today, and turning rewards into the reason they stick around.

Roles like this one sit in Melbourne, embedded in our Australian team working directly with the US CEO to help build what’s next, not just deliver it afterwards. At pay.com.au & PayRewards, you’ll join a fast-growing team shaping the future of B2B payments across both businesses.

Why join us?

• Be part of an exciting Tech Scale-up, with teams across Australia and the USA.
• Enjoy flexible working arrangements and a great work-life balance.
• Awarded 2025 People’s Choice Award winner at the Finder Innovation Awards, Finalist for FinTech Organisation of the Year at the 2025 FinTech Australia Finnies, Number 1 on the Smart50 list 2024, Top 3 Deloitte Tech Fast 50 & Victoria State Champion!
• Grow your career in a culture that values creativity, innovation, and collaboration with access to learning budgets to accelerate your career.
• Our new Pay HQ in Windsor brings together great coffee, collaborative spaces, and the kind of energy that makes doing your best work easy.

Engineering Manager

The US Engineering Squad sits in Melbourne and builds for America. Same office, same standups, same great coffee.

You’ll work on PayRewards, the platform that flips invoices and the bills US businesses are already paying into points and rewards. It's early, the roadmap is wide open, and what the squad decides on a Tuesday in Windsor lands in front of American customers in weeks, not quarters.

Responsibilities

• Throughput and predictability. You keep the squad shipping at a pace the business can plan around, and when an initiative starts to slip you know why early and the business hears it from you first, not from the burndown.
• Prioritisation quality. Early-stage means more good ideas than engineering weeks, so someone has to decide what moves the number. That is you. You are expected to challenge product and commercial stakeholders on what earns a slot, not just sequence what you are handed.
• Operating discipline. Sprint planning, standups and retros are yours, and so is the harder call underneath them: how much of the squad's week goes to keeping the platform healthy versus building what is next. You set that balance and you defend it.
• AI in the workflow. You hunt for the places it removes real cost, ticket grooming and requirement drafting, test generation, code review triage, release notes, bug bash synthesis, support triage and embed it into how the squad actually works and measure the hours it hands back.
• People and capability. Growth, performance, hiring and retention across a mixed group of engineers, senior engineers and tech leads. The measure of the job is not how much runs through you, it is how many people you have grown into leads who can run an initiative without you in the room.
• Support load. Support duty and the flow lane currently absorb about 16 engineer-days a sprint. That is roadmap time being spent on yesterday's problems, and getting it back is the key, not by triaging faster, but by driving out the causes.

About You

• You have shipped software yourself, and can sit with a tech lead on design, trade offs and quality and hold your own, not to write the code, but so the team trusts your judgement when it counts. This is not a pure delivery role.
• You have redesigned how an engineering team works, not just run the ceremonies you inherited. We will ask you to walk us through a workflow you changed, what was broken about the old one, and the number it moved.
• You are hands on with AI tooling and have used it to change how a team works not just how one engineer codes faster in their own editor.
• You have managed engineers and stakeholders across time zones.
• You are comfortable saying no. You have killed or deferred work that people were attached to, and you can still explain the commercial reasoning behind it.
• Time in fintech, payments or another regulated domain, somewhere the cost of getting it wrong was real.
• DORA or similar delivery measurement in your toolkit, used to change what the team did next rather than to fill a slide for the board.
• A background in a scaling company where the operating model was still being built, and you were one of the people building it.

We know not everyone will meet every requirement, and that’s okay. If you’re excited about the role and believe you can make an impact, we’re keen to hear from you.

A few more things…

Successful candidates joining the team will need to complete a National Police Record Check.

Candidates who require adjustments at any stage of the recruitment process are encouraged to let us know. We’re happy to support you.

We’re committed to an inclusive and diverse recruitment process where everyone feels respected and supported. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds, identities and abilities and ensure fair, equitable consideration at every stage.