Senior Engineering Manager - Payments Team

Job Overview:

You will lead the engineering team for Coursera's Payments platform, overseeing the technology strategy, execution, and scaling of our checkout and payment systems for consumers. This role combines iterative product development with new project initiation, directly impacting Coursera's growth and mission to provide accessible education globally. You will manage the payments service architecture, API development, and data modeling, while collaborating with multiple teams and partners across the organization. Your responsibilities include technical leadership, architectural guidance, collaborating with other teams, and driving strategic initiatives to deliver scalable and innovative solutions that align with Coursera's goals. You will cultivate a culture of high performance and collaboration, ensuring operational excellence.

Responsibilities: 

• Building the Team: Partner with cross-functional stakeholders (Product, Data, Finance) to refine the team’s charter, ensure alignment with broader business goals, and support overall team health and growth.
• Mentoring: Act as a role model and coach for engineers. Conduct regular career development conversations, provide constructive feedback, and inspire engineers to achieve their best.
• Hiring: Identify key skill gaps and growth areas on the team. Drive the hiring pipeline by sourcing, interviewing, and onboarding talented engineers to build a well-rounded, high-performing team.
• Advising (Technical Leadership): Provide hands-on technical guidance to engineers as they design systems and tackle complex problems. Encourage sound architectural decisions and help team members grow into technical leaders in their product work.
• Product Enablement: In partnership with Product Management, curate a compelling vision for the payments platform including expanding our international payments strategy. Translate high-level product needs into an actionable engineering roadmap. Prioritize and drive key initiatives forward, run sprint planning and stand-ups, and ensure the team delivers with high quality on product and business goals in this critical area of the product.
• Platform Leadership: Balance building new features with managing tech debt to maintain a reliable, scalable platform. Evolve the payments platform for high leverage – architect systems and services that can accelerate multiple product initiatives across Coursera.
• Mediating: Foster an inclusive, collaborative team environment. Proactively address interpersonal issues and facilitate crucial conversations with empathy and fairness. Ensure every team member feels empowered, engaged, and comfortable sharing ideas and concerns.

Basic Qualifications:

• Education & Experience: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, OR equivalent practical experience (e.g. 3+ years as a hands-on software engineer building web applications or distributed systems).
• Industry Experience: 5+ years in software product development or a related field, including prior experience leading engineering teams (2+ years in an engineering management role). You should have a proven track record of delivering software projects and managing cross-functional development teams.
• Technical Background: Strong software engineering foundation with experience in system design, data structures, and algorithms. (You should have professional coding/development experience in your background, even if this role is not an IC position.)

Preferred Qualifications:

• Leadership: Demonstrated integrity, transparency, and inspiration in your leadership style. Ability to empower and motivate a team to achieve ambitious goals.
• Emotional Intelligence: High degree of empathy, humility, and effective communication skills. Experience building inclusive team cultures and handling interpersonal dynamics with patience and tact.
• Problem Solving: Creative and analytical mindset with rigorous technical problem-solving skills. Ability to navigate complexity and guide the team to well-reasoned, innovative solutions.
• Thriving in Ambiguity: Excellence in driving clarity and results in ambiguous, complex situations. Boldness and grit to chart a path forward even when the way is not fully defined.
• Product & Platform Vision: Experience balancing rapid product feature delivery with long-term platform health. Proven ability to manage technical debt and invest in platform infrastructure that yields high leverage across multiple products or use cases.
• Platform Ownership: Experience managing a team that owns a product platform or critical infrastructure component. Ideally, you have firsthand experience defining the team’s charter and boundaries of ownership, especially in the context of evolving a new platform.
• Experience with Generative AI applications including prompt engineering and using APIs such as OpenAI, Claude, or Gemini.
• Scalable Systems Expertise: Demonstrated experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems, using modern backend technologies such as Java or Scala and API frameworks like GraphQL and gRPC. You understand how to design systems for high availability, performance, and maintainability at scale.
• Full-Stack Familiarity: Familiarity with modern frontend technologies (React, TypeScript, or similar) and how front-end interfaces integrate with backend services. While depth in one area (backend or frontend) is expected, the ability to understand and guide end-to-end system architecture is highly valued.
• Experience with payments systems, and with payments providers like Stripe, is a definite plus.

If this opportunity interests you, you might like these courses on Coursera:

• Generative AI for Everyone
• Generative AI Leadership and Strategy Specialization
• Learning how to learn

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