Director of Engineering, Payments
About the role
Patreon is a media and community platform where over 300,000 creators give their biggest fans access to exclusive work and experiences. We offer creators a variety of ways to engage with their fans and build a lasting business including: paid memberships, free memberships, community chats, live video, and selling to fans directly with one-time purchases.
Ultimately our goal is simple: fund the creative class. And we're leaders in that space, with:
- $10 billion+ generated by creators since Patreon's inception
- 100 million+ free memberships for fans who may not be ready to pay just yet, and
- 25 million+ paid memberships on Patreon today.
Patreon is looking for an Engineering Leader to lead our Payments team. This is one of the most consequential parts of Patreon's business: the systems that let creators earn a living and get paid reliably, and that let fans support them with a seamless, trustworthy checkout experience.
About the Team
About the Role
As an Engineering Leader of the Payments teams, you will be partnering with product, operations, design, and data to craft a vision and roadmap to deliver a high quality payments product for our creators and their fans. You will be overseeing a team of software engineers to realize that vision.
- Set technical direction and roadmap priorities in tight partnership with Product, Design, and PMM leads
- Drive execution on major infrastructure initiatives (legacy billing deprecation, payments reliability, local payment methods expansion).
- Set the org structure and operating model for Payments - determine team boundaries, staffing plan, and where to invest across infrastructure, experience, and support tooling
- Champion a culture of operational excellence; Improve reliability and efficiency of payments infrastructure, and hold the line on guardrail metrics like Brand Trust and Total Payment Volume.
- Collaborate with other teams so payments experiences feel cohesive across other surfaces product areas
- Make the call on build-vs-buy and vendor partnership decisions for payment processing, compliance, and payout infrastructure
- Represent Payments in cross-functional planning with Finance, Risk, Support, and GTM stakeholders
About You
- 12+ years of software engineering experience and 7+ years of experience managing engineering managers and teams
- Direct experience with payments, billing, or financial infrastructure at scale - you understand PCI compliance, payment processing/orchestration, chargebacks, and reconciliation, or adjacent regulated-fintech domains
- Comfort owning both the "keep the lights on" reliability work and new product bets in the same portfolio
- Experience navigating vendor relationships and build-vs-buy decisions for critical infrastructure
- Proven record of shipping high-impact, end-to-end product work in complex domains (ideally payments, fintech, or other mission-critical systems) at the org level
- Operates comfortably at the executive level - regularly partners with and influences VP/C-level stakeholders across Finance, Risk, Support, and GTM
- Strong cross-functional partnership skills - you'll work daily with Product, Design, Finance, and Support leads
- Deep commitment to building high craft user experiences for both creators and fans
- Experience working with experimentation driven approaches to optimize product surfaces and use of data to inform roadmap decisions
- Skilled at building healthy, trusting relationships across Product, Design, business partners, and other engineering teams.
- Nice to Have
- Experience with international payments expansion (local payment methods, currency conversion, cross-border compliance)
- Background in marketplace or creator-economy businesses
About Patreon
Put Creators First |
Build with Craft |
Make it Happen |
Win Together |
Not included in the source posting: qualifications, benefits.
Who can apply
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