Engineering Manager - Payment Team

About Tereina

Tereina is on a mission to revolutionize B2B payments. We're a well-funded, early-stage startup supported by one of the largest software companies in the world, SAP. We’re building cutting-edge solutions that will transform the way businesses move money. Our platform handles cross-border payment processing, counterparty management, bank account administration, and compliance workflows for enterprise customers worldwide.

The Payment Team owns how money moves through Tereina — from payment initiation and validation through routing, execution with our banking and payment partners, and status tracking all the way back to the customer. Our payment services are built on Java and Spring Boot microservices running on Kubernetes, with Google Pub/Sub messaging and Apache Camel integration pipelines at their core.

About the Role

Reporting directly to the Senior Director of Engineering, the Engineering Manager – Payment Team leads the engineers responsible for Tereina's end-to-end payment flow. You will work as a peer to the Engineering Manager – Platform and the UX Engineering Manager, and you will own the services that take a customer's payment instruction and turn it into funds delivered reliably to the right beneficiary — on time, in the right currency, and with full traceability.

You will expand Tereina's money flow by integrating with new banks, payment networks, and partners, and you will build the tooling that orchestrates and operates that flow the way our customers expect their funds to move. You will partner closely with Product, Architecture, Compliance, and Operations to translate customer and partner requirements into a pragmatic technical roadmap — while growing a high-performing, distributed engineering team.

Key Responsibilities

• Payment Flow Ownership: Own the design, development, and evolution of the Tereina payment flow — initiation, validation, routing, execution, status tracking, returns, and reconciliation — ensuring every payment is accurate, idempotent, auditable, and observable end to end.

• Bank & Partner Integrations: Lead integrations with banking partners, payment networks, and fintech partners that expand how and where our customers can move money — new rails, corridors, and currencies — from technical due diligence and sandbox certification through production go-live.

• Orchestration & Tooling: Build efficient tooling to orchestrate and operate the payment flow, including workflow orchestration, routing and retry logic, exception handling, payment status visibility, and internal operations tooling that lets the business resolve issues quickly.

• Technical Leadership: Own the architecture of our payment services and their contracts with the Platform, SAP Integrations, and UX teams. Set standards for reliability, security, data integrity, and compliance in a regulated environment.

• Hands-on Engineering: Contribute directly to engineering efforts alongside your team — reviewing code, designing integrations, and shipping production-quality code when it matters most. Model best practices and support your engineers on complex technical challenges.

• Team Management: Lead, grow, and develop the Payment Team as it scales, including hiring and onboarding new engineers. Foster a culture of inclusion, trust, learning, and technical excellence, and support each engineer’s career growth.

• Operational Excellence: Own the production health of payment services — monitoring, alerting, on-call, incident response, and root-cause analysis — and continuously improve payment success rates, processing times, and straight-through processing.

• Collaboration & Execution: Build strong partnerships with Product, Platform, UX, SAP Engineering, Compliance, and our banking partners. Manage cross-team dependencies, align delivery with customer and partner go-live commitments, and ensure predictable execution sprint over sprint.

Qualifications

• Experience: 7+ years in software engineering, including at least 3 years managing engineers in a technical leadership role.

• Payments Expertise: Deep understanding of commercial payments and money movement — payment lifecycles, clearing and settlement, returns and exceptions, and reconciliation — across rails such as ACH, wires, SWIFT, or real-time payments.

• Bank & Partner Integration Experience: Track record of building and operating integrations with banks, payment processors, or financial partners, including API- and file-based connectivity, message standards such as ISO 20022, and partner certification processes.

• Technical Expertise: Strong proficiency in Java, Spring Boot, and Kubernetes, with experience in microservices, event-driven architectures, and distributed systems design (idempotency, consistency, retries, and failure handling).

• Hands-on Leadership: Comfortable actively contributing to code and architecture while guiding the team on technical direction and trade-offs.

• Security & Compliance Mindset: Experience building in regulated financial environments, with a strong understanding of secure API design, data protection, auditability, and compliance requirements such as AML/sanctions screening and SOC 2.

• AI Tooling Proficiency: Strong proficiency with modern AI coding assistants (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or similar) and the ability to drive their effective adoption across your team.

• Inclusive Team Leadership: Experience mentoring engineers across levels and cultivating a supportive, growth-oriented, distributed team culture across time zones.

• Collaboration & Influence: Strong communicator able to convey technical concepts clearly and engage stakeholders across levels and functions, including external banking and partner teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with enterprise integration frameworks (e.g., Apache Camel) and message-driven systems (e.g., Google Pub/Sub, Kafka).

• Experience with cross-border payments, FX, and multi-currency money movement.

• Familiarity with SAP ERP payment processes or embedded finance within enterprise ERP systems.

• Background in treasury, cash management, or bank account management platforms.

• Exposure to emerging payment rails, such as real-time payments or digital asset / stablecoin settlement.

• Familiarity with GCP and infrastructure as code.

Why Join?

• Growth: Own the platform and the operations function end-to-end, and expand your scope across new products, rails, partners, and markets as we scale.

• Impact: Shape how payments operations scale at a fast-moving B2B payments company.

• Innovation: Work at the intersection of payments operations and AI-enabled automation.

• Culture: Join a collaborative team that values curiosity, inclusion, and sustainable work.

We are looking for curious, driven builders who want to create secure, scalable, user-friendly payments products. If you do not meet every qualification but bring initiative and a growth mindset, we encourage you to apply.

We embrace AI as a powerful tool for innovation and welcome team members eager to leverage it in their work. As an equal opportunity employer, we're committed to diversity, inclusion, and creating an environment where everyone can thrive.