Director, Software Engineering
$186,800–$299,200 year
On-siteBellevue, Washington, United States
Bellevue, Washington, United StatesOn-siteFull Time$186,800–$299,200 yearSenior LevelEnterprise
Full TimeSenior LevelEnterprise
Job Summary
Lead the design, implementation, and deployment of secure, reliable payment acceptance products while remaining hands-on with architecture reviews, code reviews, and critical delivery decisions. Define and execute technical strategy for payment processing platforms, applying AI/ML and automation to improve engineering productivity across the software development lifecycle. Establish best practices for application development, observability, and incident response, partnering with security, compliance, and product teams to ensure solutions meet regulatory expectations and operational excellence standards. Coach and mentor engineers through technical reviews and career development conversations to build high-performing, distributed teams. This hybrid role requires 3+ days in the office and involves 5-10% travel.
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of relevant work experience and a Bachelors degree, OR 13+ years of relevant work experience
- Demonstrated experience leading software engineering teams, including people management, coaching, performance development, and delivery accountability
- Deep experience designing, building, and operating mission-critical distributed systems that require high availability, scalability, resiliency, and security
- Proven ability to solve complex technical and organizational problems across multiple domains, systems, and teams
- Experience setting technical direction, influencing architecture and delivery strategy, and aligning engineering execution with product and business objectives
- Strong proficiency in modern software engineering practices, programming languages, API design, system design, testing, deployment, and operational excellence
- Recent hands-on experience with architecture, design, coding practices, code reviews, debugging, production support, and technical decision-making in complex software systems
- Experience with cloud platforms, Kubernetes, containerized deployment models, and modern DevOps practices
- Experience with event-driven architecture, streaming platforms such as Kafka, and high-throughput transaction or data processing systems
- Experience delivering secure software platforms, including familiarity with authentication, authorization, encryption, identity, and secure engineering practices
- Track record of mentoring engineers, developing technical leaders, and building strong engineering culture
- Experience applying AI-enabled engineering practices, automation, or developer productivity improvements across software delivery teams
- Experience with payment processing, transaction lifecycle concepts, or high-scale financial technology platforms
- Experience in payments, financial services, fintech, or high-scale transaction processing environments, including familiarity with payment network protocols and acceptance workflows
- Experience designing and operating globally distributed, mission-critical platforms that support very high transaction volumes and strict availability, latency, security, and compliance requirements
- Experience implementing, deploying, or governing AI/ML, Generative AI, or agentic AI capabilities in production environments or engineering workflows
- Strong hands-on background in API-first software product development using technologies such as Java/J2EE, Spring Boot, Vert.x, REST, Kafka, Hazelcast, Git, Maven, CI/CD pipelines, and test automation
- Experience with resilient event-driven architecture patterns, including event correlation, transaction matching, retry mechanisms, dead-letter queues, replay, idempotency, and exactly-once processing considerations
- Experience partnering with executive leadership, product leaders, technical product managers, regional teams, and business stakeholders to define strategy, roadmaps, requirements, priorities, and delivery plans
- Demonstrated success leading high-performing, multi-disciplinary, and geographically distributed engineering teams, including hiring, developing, and retaining senior technical talent
- Experience with financial services compliance, risk, and control requirements such as PCI-DSS, SOX, security standards, audit readiness, and operational controls
- Strong experience with agile delivery, software development lifecycle practices, engineering metrics, continuous improvement, developer productivity, and operational performance management
- Excellent problem-solving, analytical, communication, and influencing skills, with the ability to form, advocate, and communicate an independent technical viewpoint grounded in hands-on engineering experience
- Long-term strategic thinker who stays current with emerging technologies and translates them into practical engineering and business outcomes
- Highly driven, resourceful, results-oriented, and collaborative, with strong communication skills and a focus on durable, win-win outcomes
- This is a hybrid position
- Expectation of days in the office will be confirmed by your Hiring Manager
- Visa requires at least 3 days in office
- Travel 5-10% of the time
Desired Qualifications
- 12 or more years of work experience with a Bachelor's Degree or 8-10 years of experience with an Advanced Degree (e.g. Masters, MBA, JD, MD) or 6+ years of work experience with a PhD
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