Senior Engineering Manager - Payments in London

About Motorway

Motorway is the UK’s fastest-growing used car marketplace – our award-winning, online-only platform connects private car sellers with over 7,500 verified dealers nationwide, who compete to offer the best price. Founded in 2017, our technology makes the process refreshingly easy, earning us an 'Excellent' Trustpilot rating with over 70,000 reviews. We’re not just building a platform; we’re changing how people sell cars. Backed by leading investors like Index Ventures and ICONIQ Growth, and following a successful $190 million funding round, we’re on a mission to transform the used car market.

About the role:

Motorway has spent the last few years disrupting a car market that’s been stuck in first gear for decades. We’re now the UK’s fastest-growing marketplace, and our engineering team is the heart of that momentum. As we shift our focus toward profitability, we’re tackling the challenge of evolving our digital products at breakneck speed while ensuring our platform is reliable and scalable. This necessitates careful system evolution, balancing immediate business needs with preparation for the near-term future, essentially building a sleek, future-proof chassis while the car is already winning the race.

We are looking for a hands-on Senior Engineering Manager who can help us build the next generation of Motorway products with a real appetite to work in a fast-paced environment to drive developers to deliver outstanding value to our customers. You’re excited about how modern AI is changing software delivery, and you know it is not just hype or a bubble but a fundamental transformation. You understand the shift toward agentic workflows, where tools can plan, execute, and iterate across code, tests, and operations. You understand the conditions for those to succeed: reliable developer environments, strong CI, excellent observability, well-defined APIs, adequate quality gates, and systems designed for safe composition (clear boundaries, ownership, and interfaces).

Reporting to the Director of Engineering, you’ll be responsible for driving a few teams forward, developing and growing talented developers and managers ensuring we build a world-class engineering organisation.

What you will do:

• Drive team execution: Partner with product leaders to set quarterly goals and run the agile ceremonies (standups, sprints, retros) that keep us moving at pace.
• Directly manage 4–7 developers and 1–3 Engineering Managers, taking full responsibility for their career progression, recruitment, and seamless onboarding.
• Technical oversight & architecture: Own the target reference architecture and end-to-end delivery of your team’s services, breaking down requirements into high-level milestones.
• Communicate clearly: Act as the key link between deep-tech decisions and business outcomes, reporting progress and challenges to non-technical senior stakeholders with total clarity.
• Raise the bar: Join our EM guild and ensure we continuously evolve our best practices. This can span from planning, coding, design, quality, monitoring, deployment and security practices. You will be accountable to implement these practices in your team.

Requirements / what you have done:

• Domain expertise: You’ve led engineering teams in finance-related and revenue-critical domains, building and modernising platforms that handle high volumes (or high value), strict correctness requirements, and complex business rules. You’re comfortable working with external partners and third-party service providers from the finance and payments industries, and you can translate regulatory and compliance constraints into pragmatic technical solutions. You understand finance regulations and their impact on technology and how to approach them with a pragmatic yet future-proofing approach.
• Seasoned technology leader: You have more than 15 years of experience in software engineering, and at least 7 years in an engineering manager role. You have a deep understanding of software development methodologies, architectural patterns, and best practices.
• Trustful management: You have experience managing development teams and developers at all levels, including remote teams with relevant experience coaching and developing team members building trust across the organisation, and ensuring everyone understands the 'why' behind the 'what.'
• Fast pace: You have a proven track record of improving team ability to deliver more value at speed. You understand pace, how to set up performance metrics, identify bottlenecks and how to make fast data-driven decisions even when data is incomplete. You follow a “deliver now, stay adaptable” approach, shipping reliable outcomes while keeping systems maintainable and future-ready.
• Partnering mindset: You possess strong communication and interpersonal skills. You are comfortable talking to non-technical senior stakeholders about the progress and challenges from your team. You know how to work with other people in the organisation, with a collaborative approach to solve problems.
• Hands-on: You have a background as a software engineer or developer with hands-on experience developing web applications and web platforms at scale. You are able to make individual contributions across the full stack and comfortable being able to review or write code in almost any language.
• Tech: You have experience or have been exposed to the following tools and technologies: Stripe, AWS, Bun, Node.js, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Typescript, React, HTML, CSS, Datadog, OpsLevel, Incident.io.