Engineering Manager, Product Engineering

Engineering Manager, Product Engineering

At Butter Payments, we're on a mission to eliminate involuntary churn and make recurring payments seamless. Every year, billions of dollars are lost due to failed payments. Butter leverages machine learning, deep financial data partnerships, and behavioral insights to ensure the right payments go through at the right time without friction. We're backed by world‑class investors like Atomic & Norwest Venture Partners, and we're growing fast.

As Engineering Manager you will lead and grow a small but high‑leverage product team responsible for multiple key product areas (e.g., payment retry engine, ML feature pipeline, client SDK & integrations). You'll blend technical leadership, team development, and product delivery ensuring your team pushes quality software, executes with clarity, learns quickly, and works cross‑functionally with product, data science, and customer‑facing teams.

You will :

• Scale the engineering team and processes to support a growing pipeline of customers, while maintaining high standards of delivery and team cohesion.
• Set the engineering roadmap for your product area in coordination with Product and Engineering leadership.
• Deliver high‑impact features and operational improvements (performance, scalability, reliability) that directly drive Butter's mission (recovering failed payments, reducing client churn). Ability to be hands‑on in development is required.
• Coach, mentor and build a strong engineering team: hire, develop engineers, establish engineering practices (code review, CI/CD, metrics).
• Drive technical excellence: system design, scalable architecture, ML pipeline integration, monitoring/observability.
• Collaborate with Data Science, Product, Customer Success and Sales to align engineering work with business impact and client outcomes.
• Measure and report on team performance, product delivery outcomes, and key engineering metrics (velocity, defect rate, uptime, latency).
• Foster a culture aligned with Butter's values: "burn the boat" (take bold bets), "survive and advance" (resilient and curious), and "diamond hands" (master the craft).
• Experience designing, building, and managing API platforms and client SDKs to accelerate integration with diverse client environments is a huge plus.

• Lead a small, nimble team of engineers end‑to‑end: from scoping through deployment and iteration.
• Own the technical vision and architecture for your product domain: e.g., payment processing / optimization, integration with payment processors and subscription platforms, real‑time ML decisioning.
• Contribute hands‑on to the codebase, including participating in code reviews, leading technical spikes, and occasionally implementing critical features or improvements to maintain technical credibility and stay closely connected to the team's work.
• Partner with Product to prioritise features that maximise revenue recovery, client retention, and product differentiation.
• Ensure high operational quality: system reliability, performance, security (Butter is SOC 2 Type 2 & PCI DSS Level 2 compliant).
• Build and maintain metrics tracking to assess impact: e.g., amount of recovered revenue, payment success rate lift, churn reduction, engineering throughput.
• Hire, grow and retain top engineering talent; conduct regular 1:1s, career development, performance reviews.
• Facilitate agile development processes: sprint planning, backlog grooming, retrospective, continuous delivery.
• Maintain close collaboration across functions:
  Data Science (ML models), Customer Success (client feedback loops), Sales/Marketing (product differentiation).
• Promote an inclusive, high‑trust team culture.

• 4+ years as an engineering manager (or similar leader) of software teams delivering product features into production, with 8+ total years of experience.
• Experience with payments, ideally at a high‑growth startup, is a plus.
• Significant hands‑on experience as a software engineer (i.e., you can still review architecture and code).
• Strong track record of shipping product features, leading technical architecture, and driving measurable business outcomes.
• Experience…