Senior Engineering Manager - Payments

ABOUT MOTORWAY Motorway is the UK’s fastest-growing used car marketplace - our online-only platform connects private car sellers with thousands of verified dealers nationwide, ensuring everyone gets the best deal. Founded in 2017, our award-winning, technology-led approach has redefined the experience of selling a car. Motorway is backed by some of the world’s leading technology investors, having raised £143 million in Series C funding. This is a unique opportunity to join a fast-growing scale-up at a crucial phase of growth and help change an industry for the better. 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 outcome, 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 and 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, architectu