Engineering Manager, Backend (Payments)

About the Company

Day One Partners is a search firm that partners with venture capital firms to help build high-growth startups. We lead confidential searches for leadership and critical roles across a range of company stages, industries, and functions.

About the Role

We're hiring an Engineering Manager, Payments to join a profitable, high-growth consumer technology company building products used by a global audience. You'll lead a small, growing team of backend engineers responsible for the infrastructure powering subscriptions, payments, and the broader member experience. This is a hands-on engineering leadership role for someone with deep experience in Apple's StoreKit 2 ecosystem, server-side subscription billing, and payment infrastructure. You'll own technical direction, guide architecture decisions, review code, and contribute directly to engineering development while mentoring and growing your team. We're looking for a technical leader who has successfully managed engineers but still enjoys solving complex engineering problems, writing code, and staying close to the systems their team builds.

We're building a consumer technology platform focused on delivering seamless digital experiences to a highly engaged global user base. A critical part of the platform is the infrastructure that manages subscriptions, payments, and the customer lifecycle. Our engineering challenges include:

• Apple Payments & Subscriptions: Building and maintaining reliable subscription infrastructure using StoreKit 2, App Store Server APIs, and server-side billing integrations.
• Subscription Lifecycle Management: Handling purchases, renewals, cancellations, refunds, billing failures, and entitlement management.
• Payment Reliability: Designing systems for transaction verification, server notifications, webhook processing, reconciliation, and failure recovery.
• Scalable Backend Infrastructure: Developing reliable distributed services and APIs that support a growing consumer platform.
• Engineering Productivity: Leveraging AI-powered development tools to improve engineering velocity while maintaining strong technical judgment and code quality.

You'll have significant ownership over the technical direction and execution of these systems while helping scale the engineering team.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and develop a small team of backend engineers, with responsibility for technical execution, performance management, and career development.
• Own the architecture, development, and reliability of backend systems supporting payments, subscriptions, and member lifecycle workflows.
• Remain technically hands-on, contributing approximately 20% of your time to coding, alongside code reviews, system design, and architectural decisions.
• Design and maintain integrations with Apple StoreKit 2, App Store Server APIs, and server-side subscription billing infrastructure.
• Build robust workflows for transaction verification, subscription renewals, server notifications, payment reconciliation, and entitlement management.
• Establish best practices around testing, observability, incident response, deployment, and production reliability.
• Partner with product and cross-functional teams to define priorities, manage technical tradeoffs, and deliver new capabilities.
• Hire and develop engineers as the team grows, maintaining a high bar for technical excellence and ownership.
• Incorporate AI development tools into engineering workflows while ensuring sound technical judgment, maintainability, and reliability.

Required Skills

• 3+ years of engineering management experience , including managing, mentoring, and developing software engineers.
• Strong production experience with Apple StoreKit 2 , including subscription and in-app purchase integrations.
• Deep understanding of server-side payment and subscription infrastructure, including Apple server notifications, App Store Server APIs, transaction and receipt verification, webhook handling, and reconciliation.
• Strong backend engineering background with experience designing and operating production systems.
• Proven ability to remain technically hands-on through coding, pull request reviews, debugging, and architectural decision-making.
• Experience designing scalable distributed systems, APIs, and reliable cloud-based services.
• Strong understanding of payment lifecycle edge cases, failure recovery, data consistency, and system reliability.
• Experience leading technical initiatives from architecture through production deployment.
• Proficiency with AI-assisted development tools, combined with the ability to independently evaluate generated code and technical solutions.
• Strong communication skills and experience collaborating across engineering, product, and business teams.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with Node.js and TypeScript.
• Background building payments or subscription infrastructure for consumer-facing mobile applications.
• Familiarity with subscription monetization, billing systems, and payment platforms such as Stripe.
• Experience with MongoDB, PostgreSQL, or similar databases.
• Experience leading small, high-performing engineering teams in fast-moving product environments.
• Previous experience at a consumer technology company with a large, active user base.
• A player-coach leadership style, with a genuine interest in remaining close to the code.
• Strong product instincts and the ability to balance engineering quality with business priorities.

Pay Range and Compensation Package

• Total Compensation: Competitive base + equity package with significant upside.
• Workplace: Fully remote.
• Employment: Full-time.

The company offers a comprehensive benefits package, including medical and dental coverage, generous paid time off, parental leave, and additional lifestyle and wellness benefits. This is an opportunity to lead a high-impact engineering team at an established, profitable consumer technology company while maintaining meaningful technical ownership.

Equal Opportunity Statement

Day One Partners is committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive environment. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for opportunities without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.