Director of Engineering - Card & Alternative Payments at xsolla

ABOUT YOU   We are seeking an experienced Director of Engineering – Payments to lead our continued expansion of our global payments engineering organization. This leader will own the design, development, and operational excellence across global payments.   This role requires deep domain expertise in regulated payment environments, high-availability distributed systems, and global transaction processing at scale. The Director will lead multiple geographically distributed teams and drive both tactical execution and long-term architectural strategy, ensuring financial integrity, compliance, scalability, and operational resilience.   The ideal candidate combines strong technical skills and domain expertise, organizational leadership maturity, and the ability to drive engineering excellence across a complex, revenue-critical platform.   ABOUT US   Xsolla is a global commerce company with robust tools and services to help developers solve the inherent challenges of the video game industry. From indie to AAA, companies partner with Xsolla to help them fund, distribute, market, and monetize their games. Grounded in the belief in the future of video games, Xsolla is resolute in the mission to bring opportunities together, and continually make new resources available to creators. Headquartered and incorporated in Los Angeles, California, Xsolla operates as the merchant of record and has helped over 1,500+ game developers to reach more players and grow their businesses around the world. With more paths to profits and ways to win, developers have all the things needed to enjoy the game. For more information, visit xsolla.com. Responsibilities: • Lead and scale multiple engineering teams across regions and time zones. • Build strong engineering leadership bench strength (Tech Leads, engineers). • Drive a culture of accountability, ownership, and operational excellence. • Establish clear KPIs and performance frameworks aligned with business outcomes. • Partner closely with Product, Risk and Compliance teams globally to drive expansion and excellence. • Deep expertise of card payment technology including Authorization, clearing, settlement lifecycle • Authorization rate optimization strategies • Alternative Payment Methods (APMs) • Ensure consistent architectural standards across card and APM ecosystems. • Define and drive the long-term payments platform architecture roadmap. • Champion modern, scalable, event-driven and service-oriented architectures. • Architect and maintain mission-critical payment systems with 99.99%+ uptime targets. • Implement multi-acquirer and multi-provider redundancy strategies. • Define disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity frameworks. • Leverage AI to drive end to end automation. • Define escalation frameworks and operational playbooks. Qualifications & Skills: • 12+ years of engineering experience, with 5+ years in senior leadership roles. • Proven experience leading multiple engineering teams across global regions. • Deep hands-on knowledge of global payments (including card payments and alternative payments) technology. • Experience building and operating high-availability, distributed systems. • Strong experience in regulated industries (payments, fintech, banking). • Demonstrated success driving architectural transformation at scale. • Experience managing systems processing high transaction volumes. Nice to Have: • Experience working at a PSP, acquirer, issuer, or large fintech platform. • Exposure to global cross-border payment flows and FX considerations. • Experience implementing payment orchestration layers. • Strong financial acumen (interchange, fee modeling, cost optimization). • Experience with multi-cloud or multi-region infrastructure. We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.