Senior Engineering Manager, Payments

Jobtailor; California (MO); On-site; USD 180,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Patreon is seeking a senior leader to drive the Payments organization, overseeing infrastructure, experiences, and tooling at scale. You will shape the roadmap in collaboration with Product, Design, Operations, and Data while guiding a team of engineers.

The role demands deep Payments domain expertise, hands-on leadership, and a track record of delivering reliable, compliant, and customer-friendly financial systems.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience.
• 5+ years of experience managing an engineering team.
• Direct experience with payments, billing, or financial infrastructure at scale.
• Understanding of PCI compliance, payment processing/orchestration, chargebacks, and reconciliation.
• Experience balancing reliability work and new product initiatives.
• Experience navigating vendor relationships and build-vs-buy decisions for critical infrastructure.
• Proven track record shipping high-impact, end-to-end product work in complex domains.
• People management experience with willingness to contribute hands-on when needed.
• Strong cross-functional partnership skills.
• Commitment to building high-craft user experiences.
• Experience with experimentation-driven approaches and data-informed roadmap decisions.
• Experience building healthy relationships across Product, Design, business partners, and engineering teams.
• Experience with international payments expansion, local payment methods, currency conversion, and cross-border compliance (nice to have).
• Background in marketplace or creator-economy businesses (nice to have).

Responsibilities

• Lead Patreon’s Payments team, owning payments infrastructure, experiences, and internal tooling.
• Partner with Product, Operations, Design, and Data to craft the vision and roadmap for payments products.
• Oversee a team of software engineers and set technical direction with Product and Design.
• Drive major infrastructure initiatives including legacy billing deprecation and payments reliability.
• Champion operational excellence and improve payments infrastructure reliability and efficiency.
• Monitor guardrail metrics such as Brand Trust and Total Payment Volume.
• Manage and grow the team, including hiring, performance, and career development.
• Collaborate across teams to create cohesive payments experiences.
• Make build-vs-buy and vendor partnership decisions for payment processing and payout infrastructure.
• Represent Payments in cross-functional planning with Finance, Risk, Support, and GTM stakeholders.

Job description

• Lead Patreon’s Payments team, which owns payments infrastructure, payments experiences, and support/internal tooling
• Partner with Product, Operations, Design, and Data to create the vision and roadmap for payments products
• Oversee a team of software engineers
• Set technical direction and roadmap priorities with Product, Design, and PMM leads
• Drive major infrastructure initiatives including legacy billing deprecation, payments reliability, and local payment methods expansion
• Champion operational excellence and improve payments infrastructure reliability and efficiency
• Monitor guardrail metrics such as Brand Trust and Total Payment Volume
• Manage and grow the team, including hiring, performance, and career development
• Collaborate across teams to create cohesive payments experiences
• Make build-vs-buy and vendor partnership decisions for payment processing, compliance, and payout infrastructure
• Represent Payments in cross-functional planning with Finance, Risk, Support, and GTM stakeholders

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience
• 5+ years of experience managing an engineering team
• Direct experience with payments, billing, or financial infrastructure at scale
• Understanding of PCI compliance, payment processing/orchestration, chargebacks, and reconciliation, or adjacent regulated-fintech domains
• Experience balancing reliability work and new product initiatives
• Experience navigating vendor relationships and build-vs-buy decisions for critical infrastructure
• Proven track record shipping high-impact, end-to-end product work in complex domains
• People management experience with willingness to contribute hands-on when needed
• Strong cross-functional partnership skills
• Commitment to building high-craft user experiences
• Experience with experimentation-driven approaches and data-informed roadmap decisions
• Experience building healthy relationships across Product, Design, business partners, and engineering teams
• Experience with international payments expansion, local payment methods, currency conversion, and cross-border compliance (nice to have)
• Background in marketplace or creator-economy businesses (nice to have)

Core Competencies

Demonstrates extensive experience in leading engineering teams within the payments domain, focusing on payments infrastructure, compliance, and operational excellence. Proven ability to drive product vision and roadmap while fostering cross-functional collaboration and managing vendor relationships.

Highest-signal resume keywords

• Payments Infrastructure Management
• Team Leadership and People Management
• PCI Compliance Understanding
• Cross-Functional Collaboration
• Vendor Relationship Management

Hard Skills

• Software Engineering
• Payment Processing
• Billing Systems
• Chargebacks
• Reconciliation
• Data-Informed Decision Making
• International Payments Expansion
• Local Payment Methods
• Currency Conversion
• Cross-Border Compliance

Soft Skills

• Strong Partnership Skills
• Commitment to User Experience
• Hands-On Contribution

Industry Keywords

• Regulated-Fintech
• Marketplace
• Creator-Economy
• Operational Excellence
• Guardrail Metrics