Engineering Manager

Role Overview

Engineering Manager to lead the Express POS Checkout & Payments Experience team. This team owns the checkout flows that restaurant operators, staff, and guests depend on every day, including order checkout, split payments, tips, discounts, gift cards, refunds, voids, cash and card flows, receipts, offline payment experiences, and the raw transactional data that downstream reporting depends on. This is a high-impact leadership role at the center of the restaurant POS experience.

You will lead a high-performing engineering team of approximately six to seven engineers and contractors. Our core application is a native Android application built primarily in Kotlin, with some legacy Java. Engineers on this team operate with broad ownership, including development, testing, operational readiness, and production support.

As the Engineering Manager, you will partner closely with Product and Design to define direction, prioritize customer impact, and deliver high-quality outcomes. You will also work closely with Financial Services, engineering leadership, support, and other cross-functional partners to improve checkout performance, payment accuracy, reliability, and merchant trust.

• Bridge Time Zones: Foster an inclusive, high-performing team culture across distributed time zones, optimizing for asynchronous communication and aligned execution.

• Own Execution: Own engineering execution for all checkout flows, including card and cash payments, split payments, tipping, discounts, gift cards, refunds, voids, receipts, offline flows, and related order/payment data.

• Partner Cross-Functionally: Partner with Product and Design to define and deliver customer-centered checkout experiences for restaurant operators, staff, and guests.

• Collaborate on SDKs: Collaborate with the Financial Services team to integrate with and influence Spot On’s internal Payments SDK, ensuring the POS payment experience is fast, reliable, accurate, and resilient.

• Drive Architecture: Guide technical decisions across native Android implementation and the evolution of backend services toward an event-driven architecture using Kafka.

• Optimize Metrics: Drive improvements in key product and operational metrics, including end-to-end checkout time, checkout success rate, crash-free sessions, payment accuracy, support case frequency, and incident frequency.

• Build Engineering Discipline: Create strong engineering practices for quality, testing, observability, incident readiness, and production support in an environment where engineers own outcomes end-to-end.

• Incident Response: Serve in engineering incident rotation and actively support checkout and payment-related incidents within the application.

• Manage Risk: Build clear plans, manage delivery risks, communicate status proactively, and ensure stakeholders have the context needed to make informed decisions.

• Develop Talent: Develop engineers through regular feedback, coaching, career development, and thoughtful delegation.

• Management
  
  Experience:
  
  2+ years of experience directly managing software engineers, with demonstrated success coaching, mentoring, evaluating, and developing technical talent.

• Engineering Background: A proven track record as a senior or staff-level engineer prior to transitioning into management, with a deep understanding of production software systems.

• Native Android Expertise (Non-Negotiable): Deep experience with native Android application development. You must be equipped to guide modern Android architecture (Kotlin), manage legacy Java codebases, assess implementation tradeoffs, ensure code quality, and lead production debugging.

• Backend & Systems Exposure: Familiarity with modern backend services and distributed systems; experience or exposure to Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) and Kafka is a strong plus.

• Distributed Leadership: Proven success leading product-focused engineering teams across distributed locations and time zones (specifically working between the US and Europe).

• Technical Judgment: Strong technical judgment and the ability to guide architecture, review designs, ask the right questions, and help teams make pragmatic tradeoffs without needing to be the primary hands-on coder.

• Operational Excellence: Experience improving reliability, performance, and operational quality through metrics, observability, incident response, and continuous improvement.

• Product Empathy: Ability to collaborate deeply with Product and Design to turn ambiguous customer and business problems into clear engineering plans.

• Execution Bias: A strong bias toward action, balanced with exceptional judgment around quality, reliability, and customer impact.

• Experience in POS, payments, restaurant technology, fintech, mobile commerce, or other mission-critical transaction systems.

• Experience with card-present payments, payment terminals, EMV, PCI, tap/contactless payments, refunds, settlement concepts,…