Head of Engineering, Cards — AI-Driven Payments Platform

Careers at Tide; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary & share options

Generous annual leave

Parental leave

Sabbatical

Salary sacrifice benefits

Private health insurance

Life & accident cover

Mental wellbeing resources

Retirement planning

Volunteer & development days

Learning & development budget

Work from abroad up to 90 days

Home office setup contribution

Laptop provided

Snacks & meals

Job summary

Tide is transforming small business banking with an expansive Cards platform, spanning the UK, EU and India. As Head of Engineering, Cards, you will shape the technical direction, build leadership, and ensure reliability, cost efficiency and strong partner relationships across processors and schemes.

You will guide distributed teams, collaborate with Product and Commercial to deliver the roadmap, embed AI-enabled practices, and drive architecture decisions for scalable, secure card services.

Qualifications

• Experience leading large, distributed engineering teams.
• Strong background in cards, payments or banking.
• Proven track record delivering reliable, scalable platforms.
• Experience with AI coding agents is a plus.
• Ability to collaborate with Product, Commercial and Finance leaders on business outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop engineering managers and senior engineers across distributed teams.
• Define the technical strategy and architecture for the Cards domain.
• Drive reliability, scalability and cost efficiency across card issuing and processing.
• Embed AI-assisted and agentic development practices across engineering teams.
• Partner with Product, Design and Commercial teams to prioritise and deliver the roadmap.
• Own technical relationships with card processors and schemes, including integrations and certifications.
• Strengthen engineering capabilities, particularly at Staff and senior IC levels.
• Collaborate with other engineering leaders across Payments on shared infrastructure.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Cards/payments domain

Distributed teams

Technical strategy

AI in software

Stakeholder management

Tools

Java

Spring Boot

AWS

PostgreSQL

SQS/SNS

Kubernetes

CI/CD

GitHub

Flutter

Angular

Job description

Tide is transforming small business banking with an expansive Cards platform, spanning the UK, EU and India. As Head of Engineering, Cards, you will shape the technical direction, build leadership, and ensure reliability, cost efficiency and strong partner relationships across processors and schemes.

You will guide distributed teams, collaborate with Product and Commercial to deliver the roadmap, embed AI-enabled practices, and drive architecture decisions for scalable, secure card services.