Engineering Tech Lead

pay.com.au; City of Melbourne; On-site; AUD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible work arrangements

Learning budgets

Pay HQ Windsor

Job summary

pay.com.au is Australia's fast-growing Payments tech scale-up seeking an Engineering Tech Lead to guide the Payments Platform. You will own the technical direction, drive architecture decisions and lead a team responsible for core platform foundations, integrations, and reliability.

In this role you will partner with product, engineering and leadership to deliver scalable, secure payments capabilities, while mentoring engineers and shaping best practices across the tribe.

Qualifications

• Strong track record designing, building and operating production systems at scale.
• Experience leading technical direction and making clear calls in ambiguous environments.
• Proven ability to mentor engineers and raise team output.
• High craftsmanship in writing modular, well-tested production code.
• Strong focus on security, privacy, and compliance in financial workflows.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction for the team in partnership with leadership, translating business goals into pragmatic plans.
• Take end-to-end ownership of the Payments Platform foundations and integrations.
• Sequence work, manage technical dependencies and surface risks early.
• Ensure modular, readable code with feature flags and progressive delivery.
• Establish monitoring, incident response and on-call ownership across the platform.
• Collaborate with adjacent teams and stakeholders to support customer outcomes.

Skills

Platform architecture

Distributed systems

Mentoring engineers

Technical leadership

ADR design docs

Observability

Job description

About Us

pay.com.au is one of Australia’s fastest‑growing technology scale-ups, trusted by businesses. As we continue to scale in Australia and launch into the US under PayRewards.com, our mission is to simplify and supercharge the way they pay everyday expenses. Since 2019, we’ve been transforming business payments by enabling companies—from sole traders to large enterprises.

About Us

pay.com.au is one of Australia’s fastest‑growing technology scale-ups, trusted by businesses. As we continue to scale in Australia and launch into the US under PayRewards.com, our mission is to simplify and supercharge the way they pay everyday expenses. Since 2019, we’ve been transforming business payments by enabling companies—from sole traders to large enterprises.

Our unified platform lets users link their bank accounts and any major credit card, improving cash flow while unlocking powerful rewards on every transaction.

Recognised as a rapidly scaling Australian success story—with coverage in outlets like the Australian Financial Review noting our growth with a $600++ million valuation we’re reshaping how businesses think about payments, loyalty and financial efficiency.

At pay.com.au, you’ll join a fast-growing team shaping the future of B2B payments.

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 Tech Lead – Payments

The Payments Tribe builds the rails that move money for thousands of Australian businesses - the core platform every other team builds on.

This Tech Lead is accountable for the technical direction, people leadership and delivery of a team in the Payments Tribe. You will think across product surfaces, platform foundations, internal services, external integrations and production operations, turning that understanding into clear decisions and reliable execution.

You will own the foundations that other teams build on - the systems and integrations at the core of the Payments Platform.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction for the team in partnership with the Senior Engineering Manager and Product Manager - translating business goals into pragmatic plans, milestones and trade-offs, keeping day-to-day decisions laddering up to a coherent Payments Platform architecture, and using ADRs for cross-cutting calls.
• Take end-to-end ownership of the Payments Platform foundations - accounting and acquirer integrations, platform reliability and maintenance of the core platform.
• Be accountable for delivery: sequence work, manage technical dependencies, break down ambiguity, surface risks early and remove blockers.
• Hold the team to the engineering bar: modular, readable, well-tested code; feature-flagged and progressive delivery; experiment cleanup; and DataDog dashboards and alerts in place before a feature is done, so incidents surface before customers do.
• Meet the platform's security, privacy, compliance and reliability obligations wherever customer data, accounting records or money movement are involved - and push for better patterns, controls or monitoring rather than accepting avoidable risk.
• Ensure AI-assisted tooling is used as leverage without lowering quality, with AI-generated code on critical paths reviewed and owned to the same standard as hand-written code.
• Grow the team through coaching, delegation, mentoring, design review and direct feedback - staying hands-on enough to stay credible in the code while deliberately trading individual output for team leverage.
• Partner with adjacent engineering teams and business stakeholders so core platform changes support customer outcomes, internal scale and future product development.

About You

• Strong experience designing, building and operating production systems, reasoning at system level across services, APIs, data flows, dependencies, failure modes and security boundaries.
• Experience leading technical direction for a team - architecture, prioritisation, dependency management and delivery sequencing - and making clear calls in ambiguous environments where consensus is not available.
• Practical depth in distributed systems concerns such as integration design, idempotency, circuit breakers, partial failure, rollback, graceful degradation and observability.
• Strong engineering craft and judgement, with a track record of writing and reviewing modular, readable, well-tested production code.
• Strong operational discipline, including feature-flagged releases, progressive delivery, experiment hygiene, monitoring, incident response and ownership of on-call practices.
• Strong understanding of security, privacy and compliance expectations in environments handling customer data and financial workflows.
• Demonstrated ability to lift a team's collective output - mentoring engineers, running effective technical discussions and creating alignment across engineering, product and leadership stakeholders.
• Clear written and verbal communication, including the ability to write design docs or ADRs and explain complex trade-offs simply.
• Comfortable using AI-assisted engineering tooling in a quality-preserving way, with clear ownership of outcomes.

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.