Engineering Manager (Pay)

Phorest; Leatherhead; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Private healthcare

Employee assistance program

Online GP service

Job summary

Phorest is expanding its Payments solutions and seeking an Engineering Manager to lead a Pay Pillar team. You will grow, coach, and motivate engineers, while enabling execution and removing blockers.

You will work with Heads of Engineering and Product to shape strategy, collaborate across domains, and ensure a scalable payments ecosystem. In this fintech leadership role, you will guide hands-on work when needed, ensure observability and reliability, and drive best practices in software delivery.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional experience with object-oriented design (e.g., Java, Kotlin, Ruby).
• 2+ years in a leadership role at scale with direct reports.
• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• Experience with Agile teams and driving improvements across the entire development process.
• Proven ability to collaborate with product teams and external stakeholders (payment providers).
• Commitment to quality, efficiency, and sustainable delivery in fintech contexts.

Responsibilities

• Grow, coach and motivate an engineering team within the Pay Pillar; remove blockers.
• Collaborate with Head of Engineering and Product to define team strategy and roadmap.
• Provide technical guidance, reviewer duties, and hands-on support when needed.
• Ensure observability, SLOs, monitoring, and incident response are robust.
• Partner with Product, Designers and other teams to deliver cohesive fintech payment solutions.
• Report progress and challenges to Senior Engineering Manager; drive scalable system design.

Skills

Team leadership

Coaching

Java

Kotlin

Ruby

Agile

Strategic thinking

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science

Tools

Observability tools

Monitoring tools

Job description

• Phorest is expanding its Payments solutions, delivering both online and in-store payment experiences to thousands of businesses daily. As an Engineering Manager, you will lead one of the teams within the Pay Pillar, which currently consists of three teams. Your expertise in delivering high-quality, reliable fintech products will play a key role in scaling and improving our payments infrastructure
• Your primary responsibility will be to grow, coach, and motivate a team of engineers, helping them achieve their individual goals while driving Phorest’s broader objectives. While you’ll have opportunities to be hands‑on, your main focus will be on setting your team up for success, removing blockers, and enabling smooth execution
• You’ll work closely with the Head of Engineering and Product team to define the team’s strategy while also collaborating with other teams where domains overlap
• Your leadership will be essential in maintaining a stable, scalable, and innovative payment ecosystem at Phorest
• Lead, mentor, and develop an engineering team within the Pay Pillar
• Foster a culture of continuous learning, personal growth, and open communication to enhance team engagement and performance
• Actively participate in recruiting, onboarding, and building a diverse and inclusive team
• Provide strong technical guidance, ensuring best practices, scalability, and maintainability in all solutions
• Work closely with the Principal Engineer to prioritize and address technical challenges effectively
• Contribute hands‑on where needed—reviewing code, supporting system design, and guiding the team in building complex distributed systems
• Partner with Product Managers, Designers, and other Engineering teams to deliver cohesive, high‑quality solutions
• Ensure technical solutions align with business goals and provide seamless payment experiences for our clients
• Champion the observability strategy, ensuring service level objectives (SLOs) are defined and met
• Implement robust monitoring tools to proactively detect and address system issues
• Establish effective escalation processes and advocate for operational excellence within the team
• Drive the execution of key technical projects, ensuring timely delivery while maintaining quality
• Identify bottlenecks, improve processes, and ensure the team follows software delivery best practices
• Regularly report to the Senior Engineering Manager on progress, strategy, and team challenges requiring support

Benefits

• Your wellbeing is important to us - We provide private healthcare, and employee assistance program and a free online GP service (WebDoc)
• As part of our Financial Wellbeing, we provide an Employee Share Purchase Scheme, Pension, Life Assurance, and Income Protection
• We help you travel by providing a bike to work scheme as well as tax saver transport tickets
• We care for your family and provide Enhanced Maternity and Paternity benefits
• We grow our own timber! We provide a great learning environment including an extensive onboarding program
• Career development is important to us. We even have our own in‑house Learning and Development/Business coach and many online resources including LinkedIn learning
• We don’t believe in formal dress codes. We prefer causal things

You should have experience in establishing effective escalation processes for production issues, fostering operational excellence, championing observability, and promoting efficient time management within the teamYou should be comfortable coaching team members. You will communicate expectations clearly and deliver individual feedback frequentlyYou have a proven history of building close working relationships with your product counterparts and external stakeholders (like payment providers or 3rd party solutions), with the ability to inspire and motivate, improve quality and productivity, while maintaining technical innovation and excellenceStrong proficiency and 5 years of professional experience with object-oriented software design - (for example Java, Kotlin, Ruby)Strategic thinker, with an ability to express and convey thoughts in meaningful ways in a fast paced and evolving environment, with a high degree of autonomyExperience designing scalable resilient solutions ideally in fintech domainBachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or a similar related fieldYou’ll focus on quality, while increasing efficiency, delivering value and reducing wasteExperience with monitoring and observability tools2+ years demonstrated impact in a similar leadership role, at scale and having direct reportsExperience working with and managing Agile teams, as well as driving improvement across the whole development processExperience developing and supporting engineers in their personal growth and career progression. You foster an environment where communication, teamwork, and collaboration are rewardedThe ability to collaboratively lead the evolution of your team’s strategy, setting unambiguous roadmaps and goals for the team and then delivering on them in a healthy, predictable and sustainable way

Research shows that while men apply to jobs when they meet an average of 60% of the criteria, women and other marginalised folks tend to only apply when they check every box. So if you think you have what it takes, but don’t necessarily meet every single point on the job description, please still get in touch. We’d love to have a chat and see if you could be a great fit