[TECH] Director of Engineering, Payments

Work with HelloFresh in Warsaw and its HelloTech organisation, HelloFresh’s global technology backbone with more than 1000 people, building the digital products that power our end-to-end food experience. From meal kits and ready-to-eat meals to specialty offerings like pet food and premium meat & seafood, HelloTech creates the platforms that bring tailored food solutions to millions of customers every month.

Our subscription-based, direct-to-consumer model relies on technology at every step, from customer-facing apps and personalization logic to pricing, forecasting, supply chain optimization, and initiatives that help reduce food waste. While our brands operate independently to serve distinct customer needs, they are united by shared platforms, data, and operational excellence built by HelloTech.

HelloTech works in autonomous, cross-functional alliances, each owning a specific product or domain end to end. By working with our Warsaw office, you will help shape scalable, data-driven products used across our markets, working with a modern tech stack and international teams to continuously improve how people discover, order, and enjoy HelloFresh’s products, today and in the future.

About the role: What's in the Box

The Global Payments Tribe at HelloFresh is responsible for gathering payment details and processing payments as part of our subscription business model, ensuring our customers can pay with their preferred payment methods in a seamless, scalable process. Additionally, the Payments Tribe manages customer profitability at the company level using various retention-based initiatives. This team has a direct impact on the customer experience and is constantly optimising for various Business KPIs. They build in-house products using modern technologies to handle a massive scale of transactions (>8.5 million active customers) and continuously improve the SDLC for fast flow and continuous delivery.

As a Director of Payments Engineering, you will lead Engineering teams and Staff Engineers across the payments domains, supporting their technical decision-making processes. Your responsibilities will include spearheading initiatives that traverse multiple teams and domains, such as those focused on global scalability, transaction transparency, and payment optimisation. Drawing upon your comprehensive understanding of the domain, you will own payments architecture strategy and drive the long-term vision for how our payment systems should be architected, integrated, and scaled.

What you’ll do: The Recipe

• Lead three engineering squads comprising 20-25 engineers, managing Engineering Managers and Staff Engineers across Warsaw and Berlin.
• Own the GenAI transformation of the Payments Tribe — define and drive a concrete roadmap for becoming a genuinely AI-native engineering organisation: from AI-assisted development and automated incident response, to agentic workflows and LLM-powered tooling embedded in day-to-day operations.
• Own the availability and reliability of HelloFresh's payment infrastructure — drive SRE practices, incident management, SLOs/SLIs, and on-call maturity across high-throughput systems serving multiple markets.
• Set technical direction across Golang, Kotlin, PostgreSQL, Kafka, React, and React Native services on AWS, ensuring systems meet regulatory and compliance requirements.
• Partner with Product, Finance, the Growth tribe, and payment service providers to align engineering priorities with business outcomes.
• Manage, coach, and develop Engineering Managers — holding them accountable for team health, delivery, and engineering standards.
• Navigate organisational change with maturity, keeping teams focused and motivated through evolving priorities.

What you’ll bring: The Ingredients 

• AI proficiency and advocacy. Hands-on familiarity with AI technologies and a demonstrable track record of championing their adoption — whether through AI-assisted development workflows, LLM-powered tooling, or driving team-wide GenAI-native ways of working.
• Deep Technical Expertise. Mastery of a broad range of technical skills relevant to Payments — including payment processing, gateway services, batch transaction processing, payment reporting, database systems, distributed computing, and backend development frameworks. Hands-on familiarity with Golang, Kotlin, PostgreSQL, Kafka, and AWS.
• Systems Thinking. The ability to understand complex systems holistically, recognising how components interact and impact each other, and leveraging this to design scalable, resilient solutions in a high-throughput environment where downtime means direct revenue loss.
• Proven Leadership at Scale. 10+ years in software engineering with 4+ years managing Engineering Managers — not just individual contributors. Demonstrated ability to lead distributed teams across multiple offices, building trust and maintaining high engineering standards without daily co-location.
• Operational Excellence Mindset. Strong grounding in SRE practices — SLOs/SLIs, incident management, on-call culture, and observability tooling (Grafana or similar). Experience owning payments infrastructure in regulated, multi-market environments is a strong plus.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration. Exceptional ability to work across engineering disciplines, Product, Finance, and external payment service providers — fostering alignment towards common goals and translating business outcomes into engineering priorities.
• Effective Communication Across Disciplines. Strong ability to articulate complex technical concepts clearly to diverse audiences, from engineers to senior business stakeholders.
• Low ego, high ownership, and a bias toward clarity over complexity.

What we offer: The Toppings

• Global collaboration at scale: Collaborate with experienced engineers and product partners across HelloTech's international teams, in a culture of active knowledge sharing.
• Technology with real-world impact: Build and operate modern systems at global scale, supporting 6+ million customers and complex supply chain operations.
• Technical and product leadership: Drive best practices and influence architecture, quality, and ways of working in an autonomous, product-led setup.
• End-to-end ownership: Drive decisions from problem definition to production, improving systems and enabling long-term scalability.
• Access to workspace at Warsaw Centre Point: Modern facilities including showers, breakout zones, outdoor space, cycle parking, and refreshments.
• Health. You are covered by private health insurance through Enel Med.
• Hybrid Working Schedule. We work in-office 3 days a week to align on goals, with flexible hours to support work-life balance and personal needs.
• Holidays. You receive 26 days of paid vacation each year, providing you time to rest and recharge.
• Learning and Development. An annual Learning & Development budget and a Mentoring Program to support your ongoing professional growth.
• Employee Referral Program. Our team members can participate in our internal employee referral program and receive a bonus for recommending successful candidates to open roles.
• Daily Comforts. Free coffee, drinks, and fresh fruit are available to keep you refreshed throughout the day.
• Physical Wellbeing. Subsidized Multisport membership giving you access to thousands of sports and wellness facilities — including gyms, swimming pools, and fitness classes across Poland — with various card options to suit different needs.
• Eyewear Reimbursement. Employees are eligible for a reimbursement of up to PLN 250 toward the purchase of corrective glasses or contact lenses once every two years, subject to a medical certificate recommendation.
• Retirement. Subsidized PPK Scheme.
• Remote Work Allowance. A monthly lump sum of PLN 50 to cover anticipated costs of electricity and telecommunications.

Above all, we are looking for individuals who will make HelloFresh better. We believe there are many different ways of developing skills and we love diverse experiences — so even if you don't tick every box but think you'd thrive in this role, we'd really like to hear from you.