Engineering Lead - Cloud

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 Lead - Adyen Cloud Services (ACS) - Platforms

We’re looking for an Engineering Lead to oversee our Adyen Cloud Services (ACS) Platforms team. This team owns the lifecycle of a massive, distributed global fleet of servers and platforms across both private and public clouds. You’ll lead the work that keeps our infrastructure reliable, scalable, and secure as it supports critical banking platforms and high-volume transaction processing, targeting 99.999% availability across hybrid and on-prem ecosystems.

In this role, you’ll partner closely with internal stakeholders to manage a bimodal engineering strategy: maintaining stability and migrating bare-metal platforms while driving the adoption of state-of-the-art OpenStack and public cloud solutions. You will champion a "Platform as a Product" mindset, driving standardization across configuration systems, and ensuring we are continuously prepared for scale through a "Build for All" philosophy that rejects one-off customizations.

What you'll do

• You will hyper-focus on your customer needs: by creating and managing a platform that will be consumed as a product.

• Lead and grow a high-performing global team: You will directly manage distributed engineering teams across multiple time zones (Amsterdam, US, APAC), ensuring a unified engineering culture and seamless collaboration. You will lead large cross-functional "Squads," ensuring architectural coherence while fostering team independence and autonomy.

• Bring structure and process to execution: You will introduce and refine operational processes to achieve excellent levels of availability (99.999%) even during peak events. This involves managing multiple configuration systems, driving standardization to reduce regulatory risk, and overseeing high-stake vendor relationships and contractual terms.

• Foster a culture of operational excellence: You will instill a culture where engineers own production, on-call rotations, and incident response. You will ensure technical decisions utilize an open-source first approach, capable of driving code changes in critical environments rather than relying on a separate NOC.

• Scale for massive growth: You will guide the team to address key challenges related to managing large global platforms (OpenStack, CloudStack) and public cloud adoption. This includes driving projects to migrate from legacy systems to cloud-native setups and managing persistent connections in hostile network environments (e.g., traversing restrictive corporate firewalls).

• Integrate security and best practices: You will be responsible for ensuring security-first mindsets are integrated into the platform, utilizing attestation and integrity monitoring to prevent tampering. You will offer a "golden-path" for standardization that benefits all customers, generalizing specific requests into platform-wide capabilities.

• Scale AI practices in the platforms group: bring not only productivity improvements in ways of working but also make AI an integral part of the platform, improving resilience metrics and platform uptime.

Who You Are

• Experienced engineering leader: You have a proven track record of overseeing the lifecycle of large, distributed global platform. You are comfortable navigating a flat structure where "winning is more important than ego," leading via influence and technical competence rather than hierarchical authority.

• Cloud and Infrastructure domain knowledge: You possess a deep understanding of private cloud technologies (Mastering OpenStack, network topologies) and expertise in public cloud adoption with major providers. You are familiar with configuration management frameworks like Puppet, Ansible, Terraform, etc.

• Bring a strong engineering perspective: You act as a bridge between commercial and technical stakeholders, translating complex constraints (certification timelines, hardware limitations) into clear strategies. You have a bias towards impact and the courage to "Talk Straight," providing direct feedback to peers and avoiding corporate politics.

• Hands-on leader: While this is a management role, you are comfortable having technical/domain-relevant discussions regarding network protocols (TCP/IP, TLS, WebSockets) and large distributed systems to guide your teams. You are capable of driving "Minimum Viable Products" (MVPs) to pilot teams to gather real-world feedback quickly.

Nice to haves

• Prior experience with banking platforms, or managing highly regulated platforms.

• Deep understanding of network engineering challenges in hostile environments and security integrity monitoring.

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 Amsterdam office. We are an office-first company and value in-person collaboration; we do not offer remote-only roles.