Technical Lead - Payment Modules & Acquirer Integrations

wallee; Winterthur; On-site; CHF 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Modern and secure working environment

Agile, young team

International project exposure

Flexible structures and flat hierarchs

4 weeks remote work per year

Free coffee, tea and soft drinks

Team events and social gatherings

Job summary

Wallee, a Swiss payment technology company, is seeking a Senior Engineering Lead to own payment modules and lead a distributed squad across Switzerland, Lithuania, and Ukraine. You will shape the technical direction, drive architecture, and ensure production readiness while collaborating with product and architecture teams.

You will mentor engineers, hire and onboard, and advance platform evolution with Java 21/25, Spring, and an event-driven stack. This is a hands-on leadership role.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years leading a team.
• A university degree in Computer Science or a closely associated discipline is required.
• Deep Java and Spring expertise. Comfortable with a custom framework built on Spring.
• Strong command of Hibernate/JPA and relational database performance (PostgreSQL).
• Hands-on experience with microservices: service boundaries, APIs, asynchronous messaging, and day-2 operations.
• Payment industry experience: acquirer or scheme integrations, authorization, capture, refund and chargeback flows, 3-D Secure, and PCI DSS awareness. Exposure to ISO 8583 or ISO 20022 is a plus.
• Track record of reducing technical debt in production systems without stopping delivery.
• Software architecture skills: ADRs, pragmatic trade-offs, ability to review and challenge designs.
• Production orientation: operational responsibility, incident management and post-incident improvements.
• Experience running services in the cloud (AWS) and Kubernetes.
• Genuine interest in people leadership and builder's leadership spirit.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture and technical roadmap of the payment modules, including all acquirer and scheme integrations.
• Lead end-to-end integration efforts for new acquirers: analysis, design, implementation, certification, rollout and monitoring.
• Manage technical debt deliberately in a large, mature codebase on top of the Spring framework; drive incremental improvements.
• Drive platform evolution: Java 21 today, moving to Java 25, and shift toward event-driven services.
• Set and uphold engineering standards: design reviews, code quality, automated testing, observability.
• Lead, coach and grow a squad of engineers distributed across Switzerland, Lithuania and Ukraine.
• Run regular 1:1s, provide feedback, and support career growth and onboarding.
• Collaborate with Product Manager on discovery and prioritization with a product mindset.
• Interface with architecture and DevOps on designs, infrastructure and operations.
• Provide production quality ownership: monitoring, incident response and root cause analysis.

Skills

Java

Spring Framework

Hibernate/JPA

Microservices

AWS

Kubernetes

PostgreSQL

Event-driven architecture

English (fluent)

Leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

PostgreSQL

Job description

Wallee is a Swiss payment technology company. Our platform processes online, mobile and point of sale payments for thousands of merchants across Europe. You will lead the squad that owns our payment modules: the components that connect our platform to acquirers and payment schemes and carry every transaction from authorization to settlement.

The role

This is a dual role. You manage a team of engineers and you set the technical direction for one of the most critical parts of our platform. You report to the Head of Engineering and work inside the OmniPayments tribe alongside the other tech leads. We are looking for a co-builder: someone who supports the tribe and the company in building new things the proper way, not someone who only manages a backlog.

Tasks

Technical leadership

• Own the architecture and technical roadmap of the payment modules, including all acquirer and scheme integrations.
• Lead new acquirer integrations end to end: analysis, design, implementation, certification, rollout and monitoring.
• Manage technical debt deliberately in a large, mature codebase built on an in-house framework on top of the Spring Framework. Improve it through incremental, low-risk steps rather than rewrites.
• Drive platform evolution: we run Java 21 today and will move to Java 25, and we are shifting toward event-driven, fault-isolated services.
• Set and uphold engineering standards: design reviews, code quality, automated testing, observability.

People leadership

• Lead, coach and grow a squad of engineers distributed across Switzerland, Lithuania and Ukraine
• Run regular 1:1s, give honest feedback, build development plans and actively support career growth.
• Hire and onboard new engineers together with the Head of Engineering.
• Spread knowledge deliberately through documentation, pairing and rotation, so that no module depends on a single person.

Delivery and production

• Own production quality for your modules: monitoring, alerting, incident response and root cause analysis.
• Treat availability, correctness and traceability as features. Payments are mission critical and money movement must always be explainable.
• Provide validated estimates and technical analysis as input to our planning process (PI Planning and Definition of Ready).
• Balance new features against reliability and debt reduction, and make those trade-offs explicit to stakeholders.

Collaboration and stakeholders

• Work closely with your Product Manager on discovery, shaping and prioritization. You bring a product mindset: you care about the merchant problem, not only the ticket.
• Partner with the Head of Engineering on tribe-level goals, capacity and escalations.
• Build together with the other tech leads in the tribe: shared standards, cross-squad initiatives, joint problem solving.
• Interface with the architecture team and DevOps on designs, infrastructure and operational topics.
• Support customer support with technical escalations and give sales fast, honest feasibility answers.

Requirements

What we are looking for

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years leading a team.
• A university degree in Computer Science or a closely associated discipline is required.
• Deep Java and Spring expertise. You are comfortable working inside and improving a custom framework built on top of Spring, not only greenfield projects.
• Strong command of Hibernate/JPA and relational database performance (we run PostgreSQL at high transaction volume).
• Hands‑on experience with microservices: service boundaries, APIs, asynchronous messaging, failure modes and day‑2 operations.
• Payment industry experience: acquirer or scheme integrations, authorization, capture, refund and chargeback flows, 3‑D Secure, and PCI DSS awareness. Exposure to ISO 8583 or ISO 20022 is a plus.
• A track record of reducing technical debt in production systems without stopping delivery.
• Software architecture skills: system design, clear written decisions (ADRs), pragmatic trade‑offs, and the ability to review and challenge designs from others.
• Production orientation: you have carried operational responsibility, run incidents and improved the system afterwards.
• Experience running services in the cloud. We use AWS services and Kubernetes.
• Genuine interest in people leadership: you get energy from making other engineers better.
• A builder's leadership spirit: you support the Head of Engineering, involve your peers and help the tribe and the whole company move forward together.
• You possess a fluent command of the English language.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with e‑commerce ecosystems and payment plugins (Shopify, Lightspeed, Shopware, Magento, WooCommerce and similar)
• Experience with event‑driven architectures and migrating synchronous legacy flows to asynchronous ones.
• JVM performance analysis: thread dumps, blocked thread detection, GC and connection pool tuning.
• Experience in a regulated or certified environment (PCI DSS, financial services).
• Experience leading distributed or multi‑country teams.

Benefits

• A modern and secure working environment in the heart of the city of Winterthur with opportunities for personal growth and development
• Be part of an agile, young team and make a lasting impression on our products with your ideas
• You will play a decisive role in shaping products in a dynamic company and work together with leading companies in the financial industry on international projects.
• Flexible structures and flat hierarchies
• 4 weeks Remote Working per Year
• Free coffee, tea and soft drinks
• Team events and regular social gatherings

Interested?

Then we look forward to getting to know you and shaping the future of payments together.