Software Engineering Manager

A career with Gravity Payments is an opportunity to be on a collaborative team where creative leadership, passion for progress, and responsibility are paramount. Our team members focus and commit to providing for our clients and our community because we care deeply for others.  

The Payments Platform team is responsible for the merchant-facing applications and services that process and facilitate movement of billions of dollars in volume for thousands of customers every month.

Success in this role looks like:

• The team works full-stack across Elixir/Phoenix, TypeScript, React, and more, and performs integrations and certifications (MSR and EMV across a broad scope of industries and capabilities) with payment processors and card networks under your direction.
• The team can take on new EMV hardware certifications, new processor integrations, and new processing capabilities at the protocol and spec level. Expertise is built and maintained across the team, not held by one person.
• Money moves correctly. Incidents are rare. When they happen, they are handled with discipline and followed by durable fixes.
• You know every direct report's level, growth area, and trajectory. Open performance issues are addressed directly, not deferred.
• Work enters the team ready to build, with a shared and accurate understanding of "Done." Work clears each stage of development without cycling backward.
• The team ships reliably because it thinks well about difficulty, dependencies, blockers, and sequence. Estimates hold up. Bottlenecks get named and worked through.
• Team and individual goals have binary completion criteria and progress is tracked clearly and openly.
• The team is accountable for outcomes, not activity. Product trusts you as a partner on intake, sequencing, and trade-offs.
• Engineers trust your judgment because you earn it -- in code reviews, design sessions, and the calls you make on prioritization, blockers, and dependencies.
• You surface risk early. You propose process changes that are specific, actionable, and tied to what the team needs right now. You operate as a peer on the engineering leadership bench.
• AI-assisted and agentic tooling is part of how the team works, not bolted on. You use it daily in your own management. The team uses it where it earns leverage and skips it where it doesn't.

Core Responsibilities

• Manage engineers. Run structured 1:1s. Set clear expectations. Give timely, specific feedback. Hold honest growth and performance conversations. Address performance issues directly.
• Coach. Sponsor high-potential engineers for stretch work. Run promotions using our engineering levels framework.
• Hire. Own the loop for the team -- interviews, calibration, candidate attraction.
• Run the team's delivery front-to-back -- intake, refinement, development, code review, QA, release -- across the application, the services behind it, and the integrations with payment processors and card networks.
• Partner with Product and Engineering leadership. Own the quality of work as it arrives. Push back on stories and bugs that aren't ready. Run refinement so sizing is consistent, relative difficulty is understood, and "Done" is shared before work begins.
• Translate company and dept goals into team-level work. Surface blockers early. Drive creative paths forward with your Product Owner.
• Challenge architecture and designs. Evaluate trade-offs. Steer the team away from foreseeable mistakes, mindful of customer and integrator needs.
• Own on-call health and monitoring playbooks, incident response, and the long-term quality of the team's systems in a PCI DSS and SOC 2 environment.
• Partner with the Director of Engineering and peer Engineering Managers to shape the engineering process across the org.
• Treat AI-assisted and agentic tooling as a core competency for the team, not an experiment. Use it daily in your own work. Coach engineers on what good use looks like. Evaluate new tools quickly and adopt the ones that earn their place.

Required Skills

• Minimum 3+ years of engineering management at a single company (or a strong narrative explaining a shorter tenure). 
• You came up through engineering, with substantive time as an active, hands-on IC with a healthy trajectory before moving into management. Career managers (no meaningful IC tenure) are not a fit for this role.
• Hands-on experience managing infrastructure and environments using infrastructure as code standards and best practices. Knowledge of AWS services and ability to talk through architecture decisions and tradeoffs. 
• Engineer at heart. Comfortable using the same tooling as the team: pulling branches, writing code and internal tooling when necessary, running and launching others' code to debug, perform code and architectural reviews, and clear blockers.
• Demonstrated ability to implement engineering processes -- concrete examples of processes you have introduced, evolved, and measured the impact of with at least one team, ideally more than one.
• Framework-based thinking about engineering levels. You can articulate the difference between a junior, mid-level, senior, and staff engineer in terms of behaviors and scope, not tenure or codebase familiarity.
• A clear promotion philosophy, with examples. You can walk through how you promote a mid-level to senior and a senior to staff, and the behaviors you require beyond technical ability.
• Fluency in the product-engineering interface: a healthy intake, refinement, and delivery process, the responsibilities of each side, and what good looks like.
• An active reading practice. We want to know which books shape your thinking and which ones have changed your mind.
• Active daily practice with AI-assisted and agentic tools, and an opinion about how engineers should use them.

Strongly Preferred:

• Experience leading incident response and secure software development in environments under PCI DSS Level 1 and SOC 2 compliance. Fintech (payments, banking, lending) is the ideal fit.
• Hands-on experience with integrations to processors / gateways and success in completing MSR, EMV and other processing certification processes. 
• Experience leading a team through a migration or modernization (e.g., serverless-to-containerized, monolith-to-services).

This job description is a snapshot of the role at this moment in time. As our organization evolves, so do our roles. Responsibilities may shift to meet changing business needs. We seek individuals who are adaptable, proactive, and open to growth as we continue to move forward together.

Additional Requirements

• Must have access to a wired internet connection and access to at least a 25 megabits per second (mbps) download and 20 mbps upload speed connection.

Benefits

• Compensation: Competitive wage with Profit Sharing. Base pay without commissions and a unique opportunity to earn a share in company success.
• Comprehensive Benefits: Medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Financial Security: 401(k) retirement plan and voluntary life insurance.
• Wellbeing: Time off when you need it, supporting both personal and professional sustainability. Open PTO available after one year.
• Career Growth: Training, mentorship, and development opportunities.
• Support & Stability: Short-term & long-term disability coverage and wellness resources.

The salary for this position is $165,000 - $185,000. We may be open to negotiating outside of this range if the desired salary aligns with the needs of the candidate and the company.

Gravity Payments is an equal opportunity employer, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, age, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

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