Director of Engineering

About the role:

What's in the Box

The Global Payments Tribe at Hello Fresh 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 (over 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.

• 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 Hello Fresh'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.

• 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 + 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…