As the Engineering Manager, you will lead a product engineering team, influencing technical design, product delivery, and team growth while collaborating across functions and focusing on operational quality in payment solutions.
About Butter Payments
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.
Role Summary
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
Key Responsibilities
- 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.
Qualifications
Must-have:
- 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 working with data/ML pipelines, real-time decisioning systems or high-volume transaction systems preferred.
- Experience with payments, subscription business models, fintech, or SaaS is a strong plus.
- Proficiency with modern engineering practices: test automation, CI/CD, microservices or event-driven architecture, cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills: ability to work cross-functionally (Product, Data Science, GTM).
- Passion for scaling small teams into high-impact organisations, building culture, and growing engineers.
- Comfortable in a fast-moving, start-up environment where priorities may evolve rapidly (Butter is agile and growth-oriented).
Nice-to-have:
- Experience in revenue-critical systems: payments, fraud, recovery, subscription renewals.
- Familiarity with ML/AI models in production and data-driven product improvement.
- Previous experience at a startup or high-growth fintech company.
- Experience hiring and scaling engineering organisations across remote/Distributed teams.
- Knowledge of regulatory and compliance concerns around payments/PCI etc.
What You’ll Gain
- Opportunity to make outsized impact: you’ll be working on the core business lever (recovering subscription revenue) and will see the direct business results of your team’s work.
- Join a company with strong values, high employee satisfaction (93% of employees say Butter is a great place to work)
- Work at the intersection of fintech, ML, SaaS and subscriptions — a rich domain full of challenging problems.
- Play a key role in scaling the engineering organisation: you’ll have autonomy and influence.
- Collaborate with a smart, passionate team that values experimentation, resilience, and mastery.
- Competitive compensation, equity, benefits (to be determined per level).
We are focused on building a diverse and inclusive workforce. If you’re excited about this role, but do not meet 100% of the qualifications listed above, we encourage you to apply.
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Butter Payments is an Equal Opportunity Employer and considers applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, orientation, national origin, age, disability, genetics or any other basis forbidden under federal, state, or local law. Butter considers all qualified applicants in accordance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.
Please review our CCPA policies here.
Top Skills
Azure)
Ci/Cd
Cloud (Aws
Event-Driven Architecture
GCP
Machine Learning
Microservices
Payments
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