Vice President Engineering

Team: Management

Location: Berlin

Commitment: Permanent - full time

Workplace Type: hybrid

Lead Engineering Vision, Direction, and Outcomes

• Set and communicate a clear engineering vision across multiple product and platform areas, aligned to business priorities and product strategy
• Balance long-term architectural evolution with near-term product delivery, ensuring engineering decisions accelerate customer and commercial outcomes
• Champion product-led innovation that improves speed-to-market, platform capabilities, and ease of customer integration
• Take direct ownership for driving Product AI initiatives, ensuring AI meaningfully improves product intelligence, performance, and differentiation

Drive Product Innovation and Delivery at Scale

• Partner closely with Product to translate strategy into executable roadmaps that deliver measurable customer and business value
• Guide architectural evolution toward cloud-native, event-driven systems and real-time data capabilities that support rapid product iteration
• Ensure engineering execution is predictable, high-quality, and aligned with clear delivery commitments across domains

Build and Inspire a Strong Engineering Leadership Organisation

• Hire, develop, and retain high-calibre engineering leaders across domains, with a focus on leadership impact rather than organisational size alone
• Coach Directors, Senior Managers, and Managers to operate with autonomy, accountability, and strong product mindset
• Foster an inclusive, high-trust culture where leaders are empowered to make decisions and teams are motivated to deliver their best work

Elevate Engineering Excellence and Modern Practices

• Set direction for engineering standards, delivery practices, and technical governance that support innovation without sacrificing reliability or compliance
• Lead strategic investments in platform health, reliability, and engineering productivity.
• Drive the adoption of AI across the engineering department, fundamentally improving how software is designed, built, tested, and operated through modern AI-enabled tools and workflows

Own Strategic Operational Outcomes

• Define and influence engineering-wide OKRs and KPIs spanning delivery performance, reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency
• Build a culture where customer impact, operational discipline, and product quality are shared responsibilities
• Lead cross-domain initiatives that streamline platforms, improve scalability, and reduce customer integration time

Influence Security, Risk, and Compliance

• Partner with Security, Risk, Legal, and Compliance to ensure regulatory requirements are embedded into engineering decisions and delivery models
• Ensure security and compliance are foundational engineering principles that enable, rather than block, product innovation
• Oversee scalable, automated controls appropriate for a regulated, transaction-critical environment

Act as a Senior Stakeholder and Partner

• Operate as a senior leader across Product, Commercial, Partnerships, and Engineering, aligning teams around shared priorities and outcomes
• Engage with key customers and ecosystem partners to translate real-world needs into scalable product and platform capabilities
• Set the tone for clear decision-making, constructive challenge, and strong collaboration across leadership forums

What We Are Looking For:

• Proven experience setting engineering direction and leading leaders across complex product and platform environments
• Proven experience setting strategic vision and engineering direction, leading "leaders of leaders" (VPs and Directors) and scaling high-performing cultures across complex product and platform environments
• Strong ability to prioritise, make high-stake trade-offs and unite senior stakeholders to drive outcomes through empowered teams.
Experience delivering high-quality, customer-facing products in regulated or high-availability environments (payments experience a plus, not a prerequisite).

• Strong technical foundation with the ability to engage credibly on architecture, platforms, and engineering practices when needed.
Expertise in cloud-native architectures, microservices ecosystems (e.g. Java, Spring Boot, AWS), and modern engineering platforms.
• Clear passion for using AI to improve both products and engineering effectiveness, with the drive to personally lead execution
• Data-driven, outcome-oriented leadership mindset with strong cross-functional influence
• Clear, candid communicator with the presence to operate effectively at executive level

Nice to Have:

• Understanding of payment ecosystems, PSP economics, and regulatory considerations across regions
• Experience building or scaling payment platforms, processing gateways, or other compliance-critical systems
• Prior exposure to introducing AI-enabled tooling or product capabilities at scale