Engineering Manager - SQL Databases

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 - SQL Databases

We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to lead our SQL Database Core Team within the Platform Engineering organization. This team owns the engineering standards, core frameworks, and operational readiness for Adyen’s primary SQL database technologies (currently PostgreSQL and CockroachDB). You’ll lead the work that keeps our database platform reliable, scalable, and performant as it supports petabyte-scale financial data and business-critical workloads across the company.

In this role, you’ll partner closely with application teams and the DB Enablement team to define clear boundaries and guardrails for how SQL databases are used at Adyen. You’ll drive platform-wide consistency through automation (e.g., upgrades, provisioning frameworks, replication and backup patterns), set and evolve SLOs based on technology capabilities, and ensure we are continuously prepared for peak-season traffic and growth.

What you'll do

• Lead and grow a high-performing database team: You will directly manage database and Infrastructure / Platform Engineers (all experience levels). You will be responsible for both the day to day operations of the team including planning / goals as well as hiring and growing the teams as required in Amsterdam and abroad in one of our tech hubs (Chicago and Bengaluru).

• Bring structure and process to execution: You will introduce and refine operational processes, frameworks, and ways of working that bring more structure to the team. Improving incident response, change management, and predictable delivery for mission-critical, self-hosted databases.

• Foster a culture of technical excellence: Ensure that technical decisions across the team are globally optimized with a focus on automation. You'll work closely with Platform Engineers and other Leads to drive the design and implementation of new database technologies, automation tools, and performance tuning strategies across our self-managed (on‑prem / bare‑metal) database platforms.

• Scale for massive growth: You will guide the team to address key challenges related to scaling our large (petabyte-scale) databases. This includes driving projects to phase out legacy systems, championing new open-source and commercial database innovations, and re-architecting for multi-region and active-active setups, while owning the operational realities of physical/virtualized infrastructure, storage, and networking dependencies in a on‑prem environment.

• Integrate database best practices: You will be responsible for ensuring database best practices (schema design, query optimization, security) are integrated into the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), offering a "golden-path" for Adyen engineers to interact with databases.

Who You Are

• Experienced engineering leader: You have a proven track record of managing and growing high-performing engineering teams, preferably within a platform, infrastructure, or database-focused domain. You have 6+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 3+ years in leadership roles managing engineers.

• Database domain knowledge You possess a deep understanding of relational database concepts, architecture, and internals (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL, CockroachDB). You have hands-on experience with managing highly-available, large-scale production database clusters, including replication, sharding, and performance tuning.

• Bring a strong engineering perspective to the database / infrastructure team, shaping technical direction, improving reliability and performance, and ensuring solutions are robust, scalable, and maintainable with a focus on automation, reliability, and developer self-service.

• Hands-on leader: While this is a management role, you are comfortable having technical / domain relevant discussion in order to guide your teams and ensure technical decisions are sound and can partner with infrastructure teams (compute, storage, network) to diagnose and resolve performance and reliability issues in datacenter or self-hosted environments.

Nice to haves

• Prior experience in a FinTech or a similar regulated industry where reliability and security are paramount.

• Familiarity with cloud database-as-a-service (DBaaS) offerings and building automation 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 Amsterdam office. We are an office-first company and value in-person collaboration; we do not offer remote-only roles.