At PPRO, our mission is to simplify access to local payment methods and our vision is to enable the sale of goods and services to anyone in the world using their preferred way to pay. We empower partners such as Ant Group, PayPal and Stripe to access new markets, connect with more customers, and accelerate their growth.
Our strength lies in our diverse global team with 50+ nationalities and 10+ international locations- all united around one goal – to deliver the best possible products and services to our partners and customers. While our company mission is to keep innovating global commerce, our internal mission is to #chooseaction, #beopen, #thinkcustomer, #gofurther and #wintogether
The Purpose:
As Engineering Director for the Card Processing Domain, you will define and execute the long-term engineering strategy for one of PPRO's most critical payment capabilities while serving as the Engineering Site Lead for our São Paulo hub. You will shape the technical vision, organisational capability, and operating model that enables PPRO to deliver highly available, secure, and compliant card processing services at global scale.
Beyond your domain, you will influence engineering strategy across the organisation, partner with executive leadership to align technology investments with business priorities, and foster a culture of innovation, ownership, inclusion, continuous learning, and operational excellence.
Your mission is to build a world-class card processing platform that maximises approval rates, minimises fraud and operational cost, and enables customers to access local card schemes seamlessly while developing a high-performing engineering organisation capable of adapting to an evolving payments landscape.
What You Will Be Doing:
Define and Execute Engineering Strategy
- Own the long-term engineering strategy for Card Processing, aligning technical investments with PPRO's broader business objectives and customer needs.
- Partner with executive leadership, Product, Commercial, Security, Risk and Compliance leaders to shape organisational strategy and influence investment priorities.
- Drive architectural evolution towards scalable, cloud-native, event-driven platforms that support future business growth and changing market demands.
- Anticipate emerging industry trends, regulatory changes, payment innovations and customer expectations, ensuring the organisation remains ahead of market needs.
- Cultivate a culture of innovation, encouraging experimentation, learning and ownership while balancing innovation with operational excellence and risk awareness.
Lead Organisational Transformation
- Lead large-scale engineering initiatives that improve platform resilience, developer productivity, customer outcomes and organisational effectiveness.
- Continuously evolve engineering practices, delivery processes and operating models to improve agility, efficiency and quality across multiple teams.
- Foster an environment where teams openly learn from successes and failures, embedding continuous improvement into everyday delivery.
- Adapt organisational priorities and resource allocation as business needs evolve while maintaining alignment with strategic objectives.
Build High-Performing Engineering Organisations
- Lead, coach and develop Engineering Managers and senior technical leaders, creating strong leadership capability across the organisation.
- Build an inclusive, high-performing engineering culture where autonomy, accountability and collaboration thrive.
- Create development plans that prepare current and future leaders for emerging technologies and business challenges.
- Actively sponsor diverse talent and hold leaders accountable for creating an inclusive environment where every individual can perform at their best.
- Serve as Engineering Site Lead for São Paulo, strengthening local culture while ensuring alignment with global engineering standards and organisational values.
Deliver Engineering Excellence
- Establish engineering standards that ensure highly available, low-latency, resilient and secure payment platforms.
- Champion DevOps, quality engineering and operational excellence by embedding automation, observability and continuous delivery throughout the software lifecycle.
- Drive engineering decisions through data, advanced analytics and customer insights, ensuring investments improve customer experience and business performance.
- Own engineering KPIs including availability, latency, reliability, operational efficiency and cost effectiveness, using measurable outcomes to guide continuous improvement.
Champion Security, Risk and Compliance
- Foster a Security First culture across engineering, ensuring security, resilience and compliance are integrated into every stage of software delivery.
- Partner cross-functionally to continuously strengthen governance, regulatory compliance and risk management practices.
- Drive adoption of automated compliance controls, secure engineering practices and adaptive fraud prevention capabilities.
- Balance innovation with appropriate operational and regulatory risk management.
Drive Customer and Business Impact
- Translate organisational strategy into engineering execution that improves customer experience, commercial outcomes and platform scalability.
- Partner closely with Product to prioritise investments that maximise customer value, approval rates and operational efficiency.
- Collaborate with Commercial, Partnerships and strategic customers to understand emerging market opportunities and transform customer insights into scalable technology solutions.
- Integrate business and financial understanding into engineering decisions, ensuring technical investments deliver measurable organisational value.
Influence Across the Organisation
- Build trusted partnerships across Engineering, Product, Security, Commercial and Executive Leadership to achieve shared organisational outcomes.
- Create an environment of transparency, open communication and constructive feedback where collaboration extends across organisational boundaries.
- Challenge assumptions through thoughtful discussion and encourage diverse perspectives that strengthen decision making.
- Recognise and celebrate significant achievements across teams while fostering a culture of shared success.
- Navigate complex organisational challenges, resolve conflicts with significant business impact and support leaders in building collaborative, high-performing teams.
What We Are Looking For:
Demonstrated success leading multiple engineering teams or large engineering organisations within complex, high-scale technology environments, ideally within payments or other highly regulated industries.
Proven ability to define and execute engineering strategy that aligns technology investments with long-term business objectives.
Experience influencing executive stakeholders and leading cross-functional initiatives that deliver organisation-wide impact.
Strong technical leadership across cloud-native architectures, distributed systems, microservices, Java, Spring Boot, AWS and event-driven platforms.
Deep understanding of engineering excellence, modern software delivery, DevOps, security engineering, observability and operational resilience.
Experience developing engineering leaders, building inclusive organisations and fostering high-performance cultures.
Strong commercial and customer focus with the ability to balance technical excellence, business outcomes and regulatory obligations.
Data-driven decision maker with the ability to leverage analytics and customer insights to prioritise investments and improve business performance.
Exceptional communication and influencing skills, with the ability to build alignment across diverse stakeholders and cultures.
Fluent in English and Portuguese.
Nice to Have:
Experience with payment service providers, issuer and acquirer integrations, card schemes and global payment networks.
Deep understanding of PCI-DSS, payment regulations, fraud prevention, clearing and settlement, disputes and scheme compliance.
Knowledge of Latin American payment ecosystems and acquiring markets.
Experience leading globally distributed engineering organisations across multiple regions.