Engineering Manager | Payments, Abuse, and Conversion

Meet DeepL. DeepL is a global AI product and research company focused on building secure, intelligent solutions to complex business problems. Over 200,000 business customers and millions of individuals across 228 global markets today trust DeepL's Language AI platform for human-like translation, improved writing and real-time voice translation. Founded in 2017 by CEO Jaroslaw "Jarek" Kutylowski, DeepL now has around 1,000 passionate employees and is supported by world-renowned investors including Benchmark, IVP, and Index Ventures. Our goal is to become the global leader in trusted, intelligent AI technology, building products that drive better communication, foster connections, and create a meaningful impact.

You will be joining the PAC (Payments, Abuse & Conversion) team, part of the BAT (Business Acceleration Technology) organisation within DeepL's Monetisation track. This team sits at the commercial core of DeepL's self-serve growth engine, owning the full customer journey from activation through to paid conversion and ensuring that journey remains secure. PAC manages DeepL's self-serve B2C segment, driving user activation, retention, and monetisation while maintaining robust fraud and abuse prevention across the platform. The team owns the end-to-end checkout experience, payment gateway integrations, pricing and packaging, and a suite of proprietary fraud and bot protection systems. Your primary customers are DeepL's end users and the revenue they generate, with direct, measurable impact on self-serve ARR and fraud loss metrics.

Your responsibilities

• People Leadership: Lead, mentor, and grow a distributed team of engineers across varying seniority levels. You will own their well-being and development through regular 1:1s, continuous feedback, performance reviews, and dedicated career development coaching. Building a high-trust, high-performance team culture is central to this role.
• Execution & Delivery: Own the team's delivery cadence, establishing a predictable and healthy agile process. You will partner with your Product Manager to define, refine, and prioritise the quarterly roadmap, ensuring the team's work drives measurable impact on self-serve ARR and fraud prevention outcomes.
• Technical Guidance: Act as the team's technical steward. While this is a low to no hands-on coding role, your strong engineering background is essential. You will guide architectural decisions across PAC's payments and fraud infrastructure, review system designs, and uphold high standards for quality, scalability, reliability, and security.
• Fraud & Conversion Ownership: Hold the strategic balance between conversion optimisation and fraud prevention, the defining tension of this team's mandate. You will make pragmatic, data-informed trade-offs across activation, retention, bot protection, rate limiting, and abuse detection to protect DeepL's revenue while minimising friction for legitimate users.
• Stakeholder Management: Serve as PAC's primary representative in planning and cross-functional discussions. You will articulate technical trade-offs in commercial terms, build strong relationships with product, finance, and engineering stakeholders, and ensure the team's work is understood and valued across the organisation.

Qualities we look for

• People management experience: Proven experience in direct people management, leading engineering teams through growth, performance challenges, and organisational change.
• Strong technical foundation: Significant hands-on experience as a Senior or Staff-level backend engineer, with the depth to guide architectural discussions and earn credibility with a senior team.
• Payments domain experience: Proven hands-on experience building or managing payment gateway integrations, checkout flows, or billing infrastructure at production scale. This is non-negotiable given the team's core technical estate.
• Fraud & trust systems familiarity: Sufficient depth in fraud prevention, abuse detection, rate limiting, or bot protection to guide architectural decisions across a complex, multi-layered fraud stack.
• Distributed systems design: Proven experience designing, building, and operating scalable, highly available distributed systems in a cloud-native environment.
• Modern tech stack experience: Demonstrable experience with cloud platforms (preferably AWS), containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes), and API design (gRPC, REST).
• Database expertise: Hands-on experience with both relational and NoSQL databases.
• A people-first approach: Deep commitment to the growth and well-being of your team, with proven experience in coaching, mentorship, and performance management.
• Commercial and data fluency: Comfort interrogating funnel metrics, conversion data, and fraud loss reporting to drive prioritisation decisions and communicate impact to stakeholders.
• Strong execution: A pragmatic approach to balancing technical excellence with the practical need to ship, with a track record of delivering in high-stakes, fast-moving environments.

Nice to haves

• Fraud ML or risk engine experience: Familiarity with machine learning-based fraud detection or risk scoring systems.
• Event-driven systems: Demonstrated experience with event-based processing and messaging systems such as Kafka.
• Self-serve SaaS growth: Experience owning or contributing to activation, retention, or monetisation metrics in a B2C or PLG SaaS context.
• Hiring experience: Proven track record of hiring and onboarding software engineers in a distributed team environment.
• DevOps & scaling: Strong experience with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure scaling, and cloud migration.

What we offer

• Diverse and internationally distributed team: joining our team means becoming part of a large, global community with people of more than 90 nationalities.
• Open communication, regular feedback: as a language-focused company, we value the importance of clear, honest communication.
• Hybrid work, flexible hours: we offer a hybrid work schedule, with team members coming into the office twice a week.
• Virtual Shares: An ownership mindset in every role.
• Regular in-person team events: we bond over vibrant events that are as unique as our team.
• Monthly full-day hacking sessions: every month, we have Hack Fridays, where you can spend your time diving into a project you're passionate about.
• 30 days of annual leave: we value your peace of mind.
• Competitive benefits: just as our team spans the globe, so does our benefits package.

If this role and our mission resonate with you, but you're hesitant because you don't check all the boxes, don't let that hold you back. At DeepL, it's all about the value you bring and the growth we can foster together.

We are an equal opportunity employer. You are welcome at DeepL for who you are - we appreciate authenticity here.