Engineering Manager

Role Overview Engineering Manager to lead the Express POS Checkout & Payments Experience team. This team owns the checkout flows that restaurant operators, staff, and guests depend on every day, including order checkout, split payments, tips, discounts, gift cards, refunds, voids, cash and card flows, receipts, offline payment experiences, and the raw transactional data that downstream reporting depends on. This is a high-impact leadership role at the center of the restaurant POS experience. Team & Technology Context You will lead a high-performing engineering team of approximately six to seven engineers and contractors. Our core application is a native Android application built primarily in Kotlin, with some legacy Java. Engineers on this team operate with broad ownership, including development, testing, operational readiness, and production support. As the Engineering Manager, you will partner closely with Product and Design to define direction, prioritize customer impact, and deliver high-quality outcomes. You will also work closely with Financial Services, engineering leadership, support, and other cross-functional partners to improve checkout performance, payment accuracy, reliability, and merchant trust. On a daily basis you will: Bridge Time Zones: Foster an inclusive, high-performing team culture across distributed time zones, optimizing for asynchronous communication and aligned execution. Own Execution: Own engineering execution for all checkout flows, including card and cash payments, split payments, tipping, discounts, gift cards, refunds, voids, receipts, offline flows, and related order/payment data. Partner Cross-Functionally: Partner with Product and Design to define and deliver customer-centered checkout experiences for restaurant operators, staff, and guests. Collaborate on SDKs: Collaborate with the Financial Services team to integrate with and influence SpotOn’s internal Payments SDK, ensuring the POS payment experience is fast, reliable, accurate, and resilient. Drive Architecture: Guide technical decisions across native Android implementation and the evolution of backend services toward an event-driven architecture using Kafka. Optimize Metrics: Drive improvements in key product and operational metrics, including end-to-end checkout time, checkout success rate, crash-free sessions, payment accuracy, support case frequency, and incident frequency. Build Engineering Discipline: Create strong engineering practices for quality, testing, observability, incident readiness, and production support in an environment where engineers own outcomes end-to-end. Incident Response: Serve in engineering incident rotation and actively support checkout and payment-related incidents within the application. Manage Risk: Build clear plans, manage delivery risks, communicate status proactively, and ensure stakeholders have the context needed to make informed decisions. Develop Talent: Develop engineers through regular feedback, coaching, career development, and thoughtful delegation. What skill are we looking for? Management Experience: 2+ years of experience directly managing software engineers, with demonstrated success coaching, mentoring, evaluating, and developing technical talent. Engineering Background: A proven track record as a senior or staff-level engineer prior to transitioning into management, with a deep understanding of production software systems. Native Android Expertise (Non-Negotiable): Deep experience with native Android application development. You must be equipped to guide modern Android architecture (Kotlin), manage legacy Java codebases, assess implementation tradeoffs, ensure code quality, and lead production debugging. Backend & Systems Exposure: Familiarity with modern backend services and distributed systems; experience or exposure to Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) and Kafka is a strong plus. Distributed Leadership: Proven success leading product-focused engineering teams across distributed locations and time zones (specifically working between the US and Europe). Technical Judgment: Strong technical judgment and the ability to guide architecture, review designs, ask the right questions, and help teams make pragmatic tradeoffs without needing to be the primary hands-on coder. Operational Excellence: Experience improving reliability, performance, and operational quality through metrics, observability, incident response, and continuous improvement. Product Empathy: Ability to collaborate deeply with Product and Design to turn ambiguous customer and business problems into clear engineering plans. Execution Bias: A strong bias toward action, balanced with exceptional judgment around quality, reliability, and customer impact. Perfect candidate also has: Experience in POS, payments, restaurant technology, fintech, mobile commerce, or other mission-critical transaction systems. Experience with card-present payments, payment terminals, EMV, PCI, tap/contactless payments, refunds, settlement concepts, reconciliation concepts, idempotency, offline payments, or payment retry/error handling. Experience integrating with internal or external SDKs where another team owns the underlying platform and your team owns the customer-facing product experience. Experience with AI-assisted development workflows or guiding teams to use AI coding agents responsibly to improve productivity and quality. How You’ll Make an Impact: Within your first several months, you will build a strong understanding of SpotOn’s Express POS checkout and payment flows, the team’s operating model, and the boundaries between POS and Financial Services. You will establish trust with your engineers in Poland, your US-based Staff Engineer, and your Product and Design partners while helping the team sharpen its execution and operational focus. Over time, you will help make checkout faster, more reliable, and easier to use for restaurants operating in real-world conditions: busy service windows, complex orders, multiple payment types, staff handoffs, device constraints, network variability, and high guest expectations. Your success will be measured by the strength and cohesion of your distributed team, the quality and reliability of the checkout experience, and the business impact of improvements to checkout speed, success rate, payment accuracy, crash-free sessions, support case frequency, and incident response. Why This Role Matters: For restaurant operators, checkout is the moment where speed, accuracy, trust, and hospitality all come together. A slow or confusing checkout flow can disrupt service. A failed or inaccurate payment can damage confidence. A great checkout experience helps restaurants move faster, serve guests better, and run their business with less friction. As Engineering Manager for Express POS Checkout & Payments Experience, you will lead the team responsible for one of the most important moments in the SpotOn product. You will help build systems and experiences that restaurants rely on every day, while growing a team that combines product empathy, technical excellence, and operational ownership. Here’s a bit about what we have to offer: Competitive salary Training budget 3500 PLN gross per year. Access to e-learning platforms (O’Reilly). Fully paid private healthcare in LuxMed. Access to the Worksmile platform with a monthly top-up. Subsidized access to breakfast and lunch through the vending machine in Kraków office, and lunches in Gdańsk office once a week. Group English classes with a native speaker. New Macbook Pro, 4K monitors or whatever tools you need. Flexible working hours. New, modern, bright and comfortable office space in the city centre. Access to the company’s library. Great working atmosphere. Chill out room with a PlayStation and games. Free snacks and beverages in a kitchen. Company parties and social activities. Employee referral program. Relocation Package within Poland. Parking space in the underground garage. Data privacy and processing information: The controller of your personal data included in your job offer and during recruitment is SpotOn Poland Sp. z o.o. More information about data processing can be found on our website or by contacting the company. This role may involve processing personal data in accordance with applicable laws and regulations. SpotOn is an equal employment opportunity employer. Work authorization requirements may apply in certain jurisdictions. SpotOn is an E-Verify company where applicable. #J-18808-Ljbffr