Engineering Manager - Search-as-a-service

This is Adyen

Adyen provides payments, data, and financial products in a single solution for customers like Meta, Uber, H&M, and Microsoft - making us the financial technology platform of choice. At Adyen, everything we do is engineered for ambition. 

For our teams, we create an environment with opportunities for our people to succeed, backed by the culture and support to ensure they are enabled to truly own their careers. We are motivated individuals who tackle unique technical challenges at scale and solve them as a team. Together, we deliver innovative and ethical solutions that help businesses achieve their ambitions faster.

Engineering Manager – Search-as-a-Service (Elasticsearch)

We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to lead our new search-as-a-service offering within the Platform Engineering organization. This team will own and operate Elasticsearch clusters powering business-critical, non-observability use cases, like our customer facing payment search and issuing search functions. Handling massive search workloads and ensuring high availability and performance. In this role, you will establish and scale a dedicated team in Bengaluru, drive the full lifecycle management of Elasticsearch infrastructure, and deliver a seamless managed search experience for all Adyen engineers.

What you'll do

• Lead and grow a high-performing search platform team: You will directly manage platform/infrastructure engineers (all experience levels) responsible for Elasticsearch cluster lifecycle management. You will own day-to-day operations (planning, execution, goal setting) and grow the team primarily in Bengaluru, with close collaboration across our tech hubs (Amsterdam, Chicago, and Bengaluru).
• Bring structure and process to execution: Introduce and refine operational processes, frameworks, and ways of working to improve incident response, change management, and predictable delivery for mission-critical, self-hosted Elasticsearch clusters on bare-metal and Kubernetes.
• Foster a culture of technical excellence: Ensure technical decisions are globally optimized with a focus on automation. Collaboration with Platform Engineers (globally) and other leads to design and implement new Elasticsearch features, automation tools, performance tuning, and regionalization strategies across on-prem and Kubernetes environments.
• Scale for massive growth: Guide the team to tackle key challenges like taking stock of existing non-observability clusters, building Kubernetes clusters in all regions, researching multi-DC active-active setups for DC-failure tolerance, enforcing retention strategies, and establishing minimal-interruption upgrade paths with agreed maintenance windows.
• Integrate search best practices: Ensure Elasticsearch best practices (index design, query optimization, security, and self-service endpoints) are embedded in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), providing a "golden-path" for Adyen engineers with seamless credential delivery and reduced configuration overhead.

Who You Are

• Experienced engineering leader:
• You have a proven track record of managing and growing high-performing engineering teams, preferably in platform, infrastructure, or search-focused domains.
• You have 8+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 3+ years in leadership roles managing engineers.
• Distributed database knowledge:
• You possess a deep understanding of distributed database concepts, architecture, and internals, including indexing, sharding, replication, and query optimization at scale.
• You have hands-on experience managing highly-available, large-scale production databases (Elasticsearch, Apache Solr etc) clusters (e.g., 40+ clusters), including operations on bare-metal/Kubernetes, multi-region setups, and performance tuning.
• Strong engineering perspective for search/infrastructure teams, shaping technical direction, boosting reliability and performance, and delivering robust, scalable solutions with automation, developer self-service, and regional resilience.
• Hands-on leader: Comfortable diving into technical discussions to guide teams, validate decisions, and partner with infrastructure teams (compute, storage, network) to resolve issues in datacenter, on-prem, or Kubernetes environments.
• Nice to haves:
• Prior experience in FinTech or regulated industries where reliability and security are critical.
• Familiarity with search-as-a-service models, Kubernetes operators for Elasticsearch, or open-source tools for provisioning and lifecycle management.

Our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion commitments 

Our unique approach is a product of our diverse perspectives. This diversity of backgrounds and cultures is essential in helping us maintain our momentum. Our business and technical challenges are unique, and we need as many different voices as possible to join us in solving them - voices like yours. No matter who you are or where you’re from, we welcome you to be your true self at Adyen. 

Studies show that women and members of underrepresented communities apply for jobs only if they meet 100% of the qualifications. Does this sound like you? If so, Adyen encourages you to reconsider and apply. We look forward to your application!

What’s next?

Ensuring a smooth and enjoyable candidate experience is critical for us. We aim to get back to you regarding your application within 5 business days. Our interview process tends to take about 4 weeks to complete, but may fluctuate depending on the role. Learn more about our hiring process here. Don’t be afraid to let us know if you need more flexibility.

This role is based out of our Bengaluru office. We are an office-first company and value in-person collaboration; we do not offer remote-only roles.