Director of Engineering

GoCardless Ltd; United States; On-site; USD 109,000 - 164,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Wellbeing

Work away scheme

Adaptive Working

Parental leave

Learning Budget

Time off

Job summary

GoCardless is seeking a capable engineering leader to own the Riga hub's roadmap and reliability. You will lead the Connectivity group, shape how the team operates at scale, and act as site leader to attract and grow local talent.

You will drive delivery, work with senior engineers, and help define a high-performance engineering culture while collaborating with global leaders on strategy and execution.

Qualifications

• Experience leading agile teams or departments, including managers and ICs.
• Strong strategic mindset with ability to plan long term roadmaps.
• Proven track record delivering complex initiatives at scale.

Responsibilities

• Owns connectivity roadmap and reliability improvements for the Riga hub.
• Leads the Riga office site strategy, attracting and developing local talent.

Skills

Leadership

Strategic thinking

Change management

Delivery focus

Communication

People management

Job description

About us

GoCardless, a Mollie company, is a global leader in bank payments. Over 100,000 businesses, from start-ups to household names, use GoCardless to collect, manage and send bank payments through Direct Debit, real-time payments and open banking. With US$130bn+ processed annually across 30+ countries, we handle recurring and one-off payments without the chasing, stress, or expensive fees. Our end-to-end payment platform also features AI-powered solutions to improve payment success and reduce fraud, alongside connections to over 350 platforms businesses use everyday.
We are headquartered in the UK, with teams and operations spanning North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. For more information, please visit www.gocardless.com and follow us on LinkedIn @GoCardless.
Mollie is the leading payments and financial services partner for business, rooted in Europe, with global reach.

The role

Riga is a key engineering hub for GoCardless, an important stand-alone hub with over 200 people. All of the core Connectivity group is based there, the team that builds and runs every bank debit and open banking connection we offer, owning the full problem space end to end: build, operate, on-call and incident management, the same way any of our other groups do.

We need someone to do three main things: ensure Connectivity delivers as a core group, responsible for all core banking connections and file submissions, managing billions of pounds in submissions every month, work that has to run flawlessly, every day; be the engineering site leader for Riga, working with local leadership to make the office a destination for people; and help advocate for and hire in Riga, working with grassroots training schools and communities to make GoCardless a destination for local talent.

What excites you

• Owning the roadmap - strategically plan our reliability and future delivery with other senior leaders, while prioritising technical investment with a clearly articulated ROI.
• Shaping a growing hub - genuine scope to shape what Riga becomes next: how Connectivity operates at scale, and how we attract, grow and retain local talent.
• Embracing change - you have a growth mindset, open to new ideas and change, while staying committed to focus and speed.
• Cutting through the complexity - you're a self-starter who can take ambiguous problems that may be outside your experience and apply first principles thinking and reasoning to decompose, hypothesise, test, execute and deliver.
• Being customer obsessed - you focus on the outcomes and impact for customers in the work we deliver.
• Delivery - you thrive on getting things done, and on enabling those around you to get more done.
• Being a player-manager - you can deep dive into technical problems and future architecture, and earn the respect of senior engineers along the way.
• Excellence - you recognise the importance of building a high-performance engineering culture, and have a view on how to get there.

What excites us

• Experience of building and managing agile teams or departments of 20+ people, including managing both managers and individual contributors up to Principal level.
• Experience of working at scale, where security and operational excellence are critical to success.
• Delivery - someone who ensures project work is delivered, estimates are accurate, time is tracked and velocity is measured and used to improve the team.
• Clear communication - concise, regular communication to a leadership team, often non-technical, on progress against strategy and team objectives.
• A strategic mindset - comfortable tackling long-term roadmaps and our longer-term problems and vision.
• Comfortable being based in our Riga office; this isn't a remote role.

Base salary range: €97,600 - €146,400

Base salary ranges are based on role, job level, location, and market data. Please note that whilst we strive to offer competitive compensation, our approach is to pay between the minimum and the mid-point of the pay range until performance can be assessed in role. Offers will take into account level of experience, interview assessment, budgets and parity between you and fellow employees at GoCardless doing similar work.

(some of) The good stuff

• Wellbeing - stay healthy with dedicated support and medical cover
• Work away scheme - gives you the option to work away from your country of residence for up to 90 days in any 12 month period
• Adaptive Working - allows you to work flexibly, around your lifestyle
• Parental leave - to suit everyone embarking on life's great adventure
• Learning Budget - lead your own development with an annual learning budget
• Time off - generous holiday allowance, + 3 annual volunteer days, + 4 annual business-wide wellness days 'GC Fridays'

Life at GoCardless

We're an organisation defined by our values; We start with why before we begin any project, to ensure it's aligned with our mission. We act with integrity, always. We care deeply about what we do and we know it's essential that we be humble whilst we do it. Working this way creates the GC magic- the reason we all love showing up to work.

Diversity & Inclusion

As of April 2025, we had 806 employees (GeeCees) globally, with 524 based in the UK, 163 based in Latvia and 119 across our other offices.

To ensure that we're representative of the world around us - and to be able to review relevant benchmarks - we ask GeeCees to voluntarily disclose diversity data. This year, the proportion of GeeCees providing data increased to 88% (up from 79% in 2024). With regards to diversity within GoCardless, we can see GeeCees identifying as:

Asian, Black, Mixed or Other — 25%

Neurodiverse — 9%

LGBTQIA+ — 9%

Disabled — 1%

Average age — 33

Female — 45%

Male — 55%

We're rooting for you during your application and GoCardless aims to provide reasonable adjustments to make our recruitment process as remarkable and accessible as we can. Please speak to your Talent Partner if you need extra support.

If you want to learn more, you can read about our Employee Resource Groups and objectives here.

Sustainability
We're committed to reducing our impact on the environment, leaving a more sustainable world for future generations. Check out our sustainability action plan here.

Find out more about Life at GoCardless via Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.