Sr Director, Payments Engineering

Zuora • Foster City, CA

7h • $303,600 - $417,450

About The Position

We're looking for a Senior Director of Engineering to lead the teams building and operating our payments platform. You'll shape technical strategy, strengthen engineering execution, and develop an organization that delivers reliable, scalable payment experiences. This role requires a leader who combines technical depth with strong organizational leadership: someone who raises the bar for system performance, software quality, and operational discipline while helping teams move faster through effective use of AI tooling. Payment experience is a plus. In this role, you'll: Lead for performance, scale, and resilience. Define the architecture and technical roadmap for a payments platform that supports growing transaction volumes, delivers low latency, and remains reliable through traffic spikes and downstream failures. Raise engineering and operational standards. Establish strong practices for system design, code quality, testing, observability, incident response, and continuous improvement. Build consistent approaches to integrating and operating across multiple payment gateways, including failure isolation, safe retries, and recovery. Improve engineering productivity with AI. Accelerate the adoption of AI tools across development, testing, code review, and troubleshooting. Measure their impact on delivery speed and quality, and establish practices that preserve security and maintainability. Partner across the business. Work closely with Product, Cloud Engineering, Security and gateway partners to deliver the business outcomes.

Requirements

• Experience leading multiple engineering teams and managers, with responsibility for technical strategy, organizational health, and execution.
• A track record of building and operating high-throughput, highly available distributed systems, with demonstrated improvements in performance, scalability, and resilience.
• Strong technical judgment and the ability to engage deeply in architecture, design, and code quality while empowering teams to make decisions.
• Experience establishing engineering and operational excellence across complex systems and third-party integrations, including clear service objectives, effective incident management, and measurable reliability improvements.
• Practical experience improving engineering productivity through AI tooling with an emphasis on measurable outcomes.
• Demonstrated success recruiting, retaining, and developing engineers and managers, setting ambitious but achievable goals, and addressing performance gaps directly and constructively.
• Strong communication and cross-functional leadership skills, including the ability to explain technical tradeoffs and connect engineering decisions to business priorities.

Nice To Haves

• Payments experience spanning gateways, processors, orchestration, authorization, settlement, reconciliation, or payment risk.
• Familiarity with financial transaction correctness, idempotency, payment security, and PCI compliance.
• Deep payments expertise is welcome, but not required. We value leaders who have built reliable systems, developed strong teams, and can learn a complex domain quickly.

Responsibilities

• Lead for performance, scale, and resilience. Define the architecture and technical roadmap for a payments platform that supports growing transaction volumes, delivers low latency, and remains reliable through traffic spikes and downstream failures.
• Raise engineering and operational standards. Establish strong practices for system design, code quality, testing, observability, incident response, and continuous improvement. Build consistent approaches to integrating and operating across multiple payment gateways, including failure isolation, safe retries, and recovery.
• Improve engineering productivity with AI. Accelerate the adoption of AI tools across development, testing, code review, and troubleshooting. Measure their impact on delivery speed and quality, and establish practices that preserve security and maintainability.
• Partner across the business. Work closely with Product, Cloud Engineering, Security and gateway partners to deliver the business outcomes.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation, variable bonus and performance-based reward opportunities, and retirement programs
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Generous, flexible time off, plus paid holidays, wellness days, and a company-wide year-end break
• Paid parental leave (including fully paid leave for eligible ZEOs, subject to local policy)
• Learning & development stipend to support ongoing growth
• Opportunities to volunteer and give back, including charitable donation matching where available
• Mental wellbeing resources and support

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: No Education Listed