Sr Director, Payments Engineering

The Opportunity

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.

You bring

• 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.

Preferred experience

• Payments experience spanning gateways, processors, orchestration, authorization, settlement, reconciliation, or payment risk.
• Familiarity with financial transaction correctness, idempotency, payment security, and PCI compliance.

Additional information

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.

Benefits

Zuora offers a comprehensive total rewards package designed to support ZEOs' wellbeing, growth, and flexibility. While specific offerings may vary by country, we typically provide:

• 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

• *Benefits may vary by location; details will be shared during the interview process
• #ZEOLife at Zuora

ZEOs (our employees) are empowered to take ownership, challenge the status quo, and make a real impact. We:

• Collaborate deeply across teams and regions
• Learn constantly and iterate often
• Build an inclusive, high-performance culture where people feel inspired, connected, and valued

• Our Commitment to an Inclusive Workplace
• Think, be and do you.
• At Zuora, different perspectives, experiences, and contributions matter - everyone counts.
• We encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply. Applicants in need of special assistance or accommodation during the interview process or in accessing our website may contact us by sending an email to (or local equivalent, where applicable).
• The base pay details represent the annualized salary range for the posted position.

While we share a comprehensive range, a candidate's final base salary will fall within these guidelines and will be determined based on multiple factors including but not limited to: qualifications of the candidate, job related knowledge, prior related experience, specific and unique skills, the location of the role, internal equity and internal budget. Base pay is only one element of Zuora's Total Rewards Package.

• Additional elements may also include bonus/variable compensation, equity and comprehensive benefits, more details found here.
• Base Pay Details $303,600 - $455,400 USD