Sr Director, Payments Engineering

About Zuora

At Zuora, we help businesses grow smarter and adapt faster. Our platform powers modern business models — from subscriptions and usage-based pricing to AI-driven and outcome-based offerings — helping companies launch new products, automate complex billing, and unlock predictable, recurring revenue.

We’ve led the Subscription Economy for more than a decade. Now we’re evolving again by building the definitive platform for quote to cash and helping companies monetize their products and services with an adaptable, AI-ready foundation.

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.

About You

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.

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.

About the Team

You'll lead multiple engineering teams and managers responsible for the full lifecycle of our payments platform—from system architecture and gateway integration to operational reliability and continuous improvement. The organization combines deep technical expertise with strong execution discipline. Success in this role means building leadership capacity across the team, translating business priorities into measurable engineering outcomes, and establishing clear ownership and accountability for delivery, quality, and reliability. You'll work in close partnership with Product, Cloud Engineering, and Security to ensure the platform meets business needs while maintaining the highest standards for performance, availability, and security.

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.

Zuora is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer committed to creating an inclusive environment for all. We do not discriminate on the basis of, and consider individuals seeking employment with Zuora without regard to, race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, reproductive health decisions, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, political views or activity, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.

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 [email protected] (or local equivalent, where applicable).