Engineering Team Lead

Why Paynovate? Paynovate is a growing Belgian fintech with over 80 employees, developing payment solutions in a fast-moving, regulated environment. We value autonomy, ownership and teamwork. Join our Infrastructure team and take on technical and leadership challenges at the heart of our payment platform. Your Role Reporting to the Head of Engineering, you'll lead our team of four System Engineers, drive our AWS-first strategy and keep our platform secure, reliable and cost-efficient. This is a hands-on role: around half of your time will go to engineering work alongside your team, the other half to technical leadership, governance, planning and people management. You'll join the Engineering management team, shaping technical direction alongside fellow team leads and senior technical contributors. You’ll work closely with Security, Compliance, Risk, Finance and Operations, and above all with delivery teams, giving them a secure, compliant platform they can ship on autonomously. What You'll Work On Our Infrastructure team powers a payment platform undergoing significant modernisation, with the following key priorities:
• AWS-first: Migrating our remaining on-premises solutions to the cloud and making AWS the default for everything we build and run.
• Reliability and compliance: Keeping our infrastructure reliable, observable and compliant with PCI-DSS, PCI-PIN, DORA and other regulatory requirements.
• Platform hardening: Strengthening the security of our operating systems, networks and third-party integrations against evolving threats.
• Autonomous delivery enablement: Improving our operating model so delivery teams ship autonomously through a DevOps culture, CI/CD and automation, while keeping strong control over production changes.

What You'll Do
System Engineering:
• Lead the infrastructure side of our AWS migration while keeping existing systems stable.
• Design, build and troubleshoot cloud and on-premises systems using Terraform, Ansible, Docker and AWS services.
• Build and improve the CI/CD pipelines, automation and self-service tooling that delivery teams use to deploy and run their services.
• Operate our MySQL databases in production.
• Participate in a compensated on-call rotation, approximately one week per month. Team Leadership:
• Hold one-to-ones, provide regular feedback and conduct annual performance reviews.
• Manage recruitment, onboarding and team development, coaching engineers and strengthening technical practices.
• Build a healthy, collaborative team culture where issues are raised and resolved early.
• Lead delivery planning and execution, balancing team capacity, business priorities, platform reliability and technical debt.
• Work with fellow team leads on cross-team initiatives, such as bringing AI into our engineering workflows and evolving our shared SDLC and change-management practices.
• Communicate plans, priorities and technical decisions clearly within the team and to technical and non-technical stakeholders. Technical and Operational Leadership:
• Own the infrastructure roadmap, in alignment with delivery teams and the Engineering management team.
• Own monitoring, alerting and incident management: SLOs, MTTA/MTTR, observability dashboards and blameless post-mortems.
• Lead cloud architecture discussions and decisions with architects and delivery teams.
• Shape our platform engineering approach, providing self-service tools and guidance that empower delivery teams.
• Drive security initiatives together with Security and Risk.
• Own infrastructure spend: track costs, negotiate with providers, and optimise our usage. What You Bring Essential:
• Strong AWS experience, including architecture, operations and security.
• Solid experience with Linux, Docker and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible).
• Good understanding of networking and hybrid cloud/on-premises environments.
• Experience with CI/CD, infrastructure automation, observability and production troubleshooting.
• Experience leading an engineering team, including direct people management, coaching and delivery ownership.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to work across teams.
• A pragmatic, business-aware approach to technical decisions.
• Professional working proficiency in English. Nice to Have:
• Experience operating MySQL in production.
• Experience with HSMs.
• Experience in payments, fintech or another regulated environment, ideally with PCI-DSS, PCI-PIN or DORA.
• Experience working with vendors and keeping infrastructure costs under control. Don't tick every box? We'd still like to hear from you How We Work Our engineering culture is built on a balance between autonomy and teamwork, guided by three principles:
• Autonomy: "I can do it." Take initiative, solve problems and know when to ask for help.
• Ownership: "I make sure it gets done." Take responsibility and follow things through.
• One Team: "We succeed together." Communicate openly, share knowledge and support each other.

What we offer
• A hands-on leadership role with real autonomy and impact on how our payment platform evolves.
• Technical challenges in payments, including the modernisation of existing systems.
• A collaborative team and opportunities to develop your skills.
• Hybrid working and a benefits package including 32 days of holiday, a mobility budget, meal vouchers, health and group insurance, a phone, and a homeworking allowance. Interview Process
• Technical Background and Ways of Working (60–90 min): Meet other Engineering Team Leads. We'll dive into your technical background and discuss how we collaborate, solve problems and support each other as peers.
• Department Vision and Q&A (60 min): Meet our Head of Engineering. This is an opportunity to understand the broader company strategy, learn about the engineering department's goals and ask any big-picture questions you have

about the role
.
• Meet the Team (30 min): An informal chat with one or two engineers from your future team. This is a two-way street: it gives the team a chance to meet their future manager and gives you a feel for the people you'll be leading day to day.