Director of Engineering, Payments

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 di