deepl - Engineering Manager | Payments, Abuse, and Conversion

Remote - London1mo ago

Requirements

• Fraud ML or risk engine experience: Familiarity with machine learning-based fraud detection or risk scoring systems. • Event-driven systems: Demonstrated experience with event-based processing and messaging systems such as Kafka. • Self-serve SaaS growth: Experience owning or contributing to activation, retention, or monetisation metrics in a B2C or PLG SaaS context. • Hiring experience: Proven track record of hiring and onboarding software engineers in a distributed team environment. • DevOps & scaling: Strong experience with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure scaling, and cloud migration.

Responsibilities

• People Leadership: Lead, mentor, and grow a distributed team of engineers across varying seniority levels. You will own their well-being and development through regular 1:1s, continuous feedback, performance reviews, and dedicated career development coaching. Building a high-trust, high-performance team culture is central to this role. • Execution & Delivery: Own the team's delivery cadence, establishing a predictable and healthy agile process. You will partner with your Product Manager to define, refine, and prioritise the quarterly roadmap, ensuring the team's work drives measurable impact on self-serve ARR and fraud prevention outcomes. • Technical Guidance: Act as the team's technical steward. While this is a low to no hands-on coding role, your strong engineering background is essential. You will guide architectural decisions across PAC's payments and fraud infrastructure, review system designs, and uphold high standards for quality, scalability, reliability, and security. • Fraud & Conversion Ownership: Hold the strategic balance between conversion optimisation and fraud prevention, the defining tension of this team's mandate. You will make pragmatic, data-informed trade-offs across activation, retention, bot protection, rate limiting, and abuse detection to protect DeepL's revenue while minimising friction for legitimate users. • Stakeholder Management: Serve as PAC's primary representative in planning and cross-functional discussions. You will articulate technical trade-offs in commercial terms, build strong relationships with product, finance, and engineering stakeholders, and ensure the team's work is understood and valued across the organisation. • QUALITIES WE LOOK FOR • People management experience: Proven experience in direct people management, leading engineering teams through growth, performance challenges, and organisational change. • Strong technical foundation: Significant hands-on experience as a Senior or Staff-level backend engineer, with the depth to guide architectural discussions and earn credibility with a senior team. • Payments domain experience: Proven hands-on experience building or managing payment gateway integrations, checkout flows, or billing infrastructure at production scale. This is non-negotiable given the team's core technical estate. • Fraud & trust systems familiarity: Sufficient depth in fraud prevention, abuse detection, rate limiting, or bot protection to guide architectural decisions across a complex, multi-layered fraud stack. • Distributed systems design: Proven experience designing, building, and operating scalable, highly available distributed systems in a cloud-native environment. • Modern tech stack experience: Demonstrable experience with cloud platforms (preferably AWS), containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes), and API design (gRPC, REST). • Database expertise: Hands-on experience with both relational and NoSQL databases. • A people-first approach: Deep commitment to the growth and well-being of your team, with proven experience in coaching, mentorship, and performance management. • Commercial and data fluency: Comfort interrogating funnel metrics, conversion data, and fraud loss reporting to drive prioritisation decisions and communicate impact to stakeholders. • Strong execution: A pragmatic approach to balancing technical excellence with the practical need to ship, with a track record of delivering in high-stakes, fast-moving environments.

Benefits

• Diverse and internationally distributed team: joining our team means becoming part of a large, global community with people of more than 90 nationalities. We're more than just colleagues; we're a group of professionals with a shared mission to connect diverse cultures. Our global presence is growing–we've doubled in size nearly every year, with our employees based in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, the US, and Japan, and we continue to expand our network. • Open communication, regular feedback: as a language-focused company, we value the importance of clear, honest communication. We value smooth collaboration, direct and actionable feedback, and believe that leading with empathy and growth mindset makes us better together. • Hybrid work, flexible hours: we offer a hybrid work schedule, with team members coming into the office twice a week. This allows you to engage directly with your team and experience the unique energy of our workspace, while still enjoying the flexibility and comfort of working from home. With flexible working hours and trust in your productivity, we are in sync with your team’s general locations and time zones to foster effective and seamless collaboration. • Virtual Shares - An ownership mindset in every role. We believe everyone should share in our success, and that’s why every employee receives Virtual Shares, linking your contribution directly to DeepL’s growth and rewarding you with a stake in our future. • Regular in-person team events: we bond over vibrant events that are as unique as our team, from local team and business unit gatherings, to new-joiner onboardings, to company-wide events that bring us all together–literally.