Engineering Manager

SpotOn is a company focused on providing restaurant technology solutions, including an award-winning point-of-sale (POS) system and AI-powered profit tools. The company supports independent restaurants with tools to improve profit and operational efficiency. The Engineering Manager role is within the Express POS Checkout & Payments Experience team, which handles critical checkout flows and payment processes for restaurant operators, staff, and guests.

• Minimum 2 years of experience managing software engineers with success in coaching, mentoring, evaluating, and developing technical talent.
• Proven track record as a senior or staff-level engineer with deep understanding of production software systems.
• Deep experience with native Android application development using Kotlin and managing legacy Java codebases.
• Familiarity with modern backend services, distributed systems, event-driven architecture, and Kafka.
• Experience leading distributed product-focused engineering teams across US and Europe time zones.
• Strong technical judgment to guide architecture, review designs, and help teams make pragmatic tradeoffs.
• Experience improving reliability, performance, and operational quality through metrics, observability, incident response, and continuous improvement.
• Ability to collaborate with Product and Design to translate ambiguous customer and business problems into engineering plans.
• Strong bias toward action balanced with judgment on quality, reliability, and customer impact.

Nice to have:

• Experience in POS, payments, restaurant technology, fintech, mobile commerce, or mission-critical transaction systems.
• Knowledge of card-present payments, payment terminals, EMV, PCI, tap/contactless payments, refunds, settlement, reconciliation, idempotency, offline payments, or payment retry/error handling.
• Experience integrating with internal or external SDKs.
• Experience with AI-assisted development workflows or guiding teams in responsible use of AI coding agents.

Team Leadership & Execution:

• Lead a high-performing engineering team of six to seven engineers and contractors.
• 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.
• Foster an inclusive, high-performing team culture across distributed time zones, optimizing for asynchronous communication and aligned execution.
• Develop engineers through regular feedback, coaching, career development, and thoughtful delegation.

Technical & Architectural Guidance:

• Guide technical decisions across native Android implementation and backend services evolution toward event-driven architecture using Kafka.
• Collaborate with the Financial Services team to integrate with and influence SpotOn’s internal Payments SDK.
• Create strong engineering practices for quality, testing, observability, incident readiness, and production support.

Operational Excellence & Incident Management:

• Drive improvements in key product and operational metrics such as checkout time, success rate, crash-free sessions, payment accuracy, and incident frequency.
• Serve in the Engineering Manager incident commander rotation and actively support checkout and payment-related incidents.
• Build clear plans, manage delivery risks, communicate status proactively, and ensure stakeholders have necessary context.