Director of Engineering, Payments

About the role: What's in the Box

The Global Payments Tribe at HelloFresh is responsible for gathering payment details and processing payments as part of our subscription business model, ensuring our customers can pay with their preferred payment methods in a seamless, scalable process. Additionally, the Payments Tribe manages customer profitability at the company level using various retention-based initiatives. This team has a direct impact on the customer experience and is constantly optimising for various Business KPIs. They build in-house products using modern technologies to handle a massive scale of transactions (>8.5 million active customers) and continuously improve the SDLC for fast flow and continuous delivery.

As a Director of Payments Engineering, you will lead Engineering teams and Staff Engineers across the payments domains, supporting their technical decision-making processes. Your responsibilities will include spearheading initiatives that traverse multiple teams and domains, such as those focused on global scalability, transaction transparency, and payment optimisation. Drawing upon your comprehensive understanding of the domain, you will own payments architecture strategy and drive the long-term vision for how our payment systems should be architected, integrated, and scaled.

What you’ll do: The Recipe

• Lead three engineering squads comprising 20-25 engineers, managing Engineering Managers and Staff Engineers across Warsaw and Berlin.
• Own the GenAI transformation of the Payments Tribe — define and drive a concrete roadmap for becoming a genuinely AI-native engineering organisation: from AI-assisted development and automated incident response, to agentic workflows and LLM-powered tooling embedded in day-to-day operations.
• Own the availability and reliability of HelloFresh's payment infrastructure — drive SRE practices, incident management, SLOs/SLIs, and on-call maturity across high-throughput systems serving multiple markets.
• Set technical direction across Golang, Kotlin, PostgreSQL, Kafka, React, and React Native services on AWS, ensuring systems meet regulatory and compliance requirements.
• Partner with Product, Finance, the Growth tribe, and payment service providers to align engineering priorities with business outcomes.
• Manage, coach, and develop Engineering Managers — holding them accountable for team health, delivery, and engineering standards.
• Navigate organisational change with maturity, keeping teams focused and motivated through evolving priorities.

What you’ll bring: The Ingredients 

• AI proficiency and advocacy. Hands-on familiarity with AI technologies and a demonstrable track record of championing their adoption — whether through AI-assisted development workflows, LLM-powered tooling, or driving team-wide GenAI-native ways of working.
• Deep Technical Expertise. Mastery of a broad range of technical skills relevant to Payments — including payment processing, gateway services, batch transaction processing, payment reporting, database systems, distributed computing, and backend development frameworks. Hands-on familiarity with Golang, Kotlin, PostgreSQL, Kafka, and AWS.
• Systems Thinking. The ability to understand complex systems holistically, recognising how components interact and impact each other, and leveraging this to design scalable, resilient solutions in a high-throughput environment where downtime means direct revenue loss.
• Proven Leadership at Scale. 10+ years in software engineering with 4+ years managing Engineering Managers — not just individual contributors. Demonstrated ability to lead distributed teams across multiple offices, building trust and maintaining high engineering standards without daily co-location.
• Operational Excellence Mindset. Strong grounding in SRE practices — SLOs/SLIs, incident management, on-call culture, and observability tooling (Grafana or similar). Experience owning payments infrastructure in regulated, multi-market environments is a strong plus.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration. Exceptional ability to work across engineering disciplines, Product, Finance, and external payment service providers — fostering alignment towards common goals and translating business outcomes into engineering priorities.
• Effective Communication Across Disciplines. Strong ability to articulate complex technical concepts clearly to diverse audiences, from engineers to senior business stakeholders.
• Low ego, high ownership, and a bias toward clarity over complexity.

What we offer: The Toppings

• Shape the future of food: Play a key role in transforming how millions of people eat as we grow into a global food solutions company.
• Drive transformational change: Your decisions will have a direct and immediate impact, helping to shape strategy, scale teams, and redefine leadership in a rapidly evolving business.
• Build a global brand: Create deeper, more sustainable connections with our customers, putting them at the heart of every decision.
• Benefit from long-term wealth creation: Your compensation is heavily weighted toward equity, directly aligning your personal success with the company's future through our Virtual Stock Option (VSO) and Restricted Stock Unit (RSU) plans.
• Thrive in a high-performance environment: Work with ambitious, intellectually curious peers on a global scale, enjoying an environment built for empowerment and speed.
• Enjoy a discount on HelloFresh meal kits, delivered straight to your door.
• Build for the long-term with our company pension scheme

Are you the missing ingredient? If this sounds like a tasty opportunity, we’d be excited to hear from you. We aim to review your profile and respond within 5 business days.