Senior Engineering Manager, Core Platform

Nice to Meet You! We are Ascenda

Ascenda provides the rewards infrastructure for leading financial services brands across the world. Our clients include the world's largest banks, top-tier card issuers, and fintechs who utilize our rewards infrastructure to power their earn & burn rewards programs. These include American Express, CapitalOne, HSBC, Brex, Virgin Money, SMBC, ICBC, Bradesco, ANZ, HDFC, and Top 10 financial services brands in many other countries. With a best-in-class technology suite and the world's broadest rewards content marketplace, we are the engine behind winning premium rewards propositions for financial services all around the globe.

Our clients are spread across continents, and we serve over 1 billion customers globally. No matter where you are, you'll recognize our footprint! We believe nothing should stand in the way of companies striving to drive growth via compelling and effortless reward propositions that their customers love. Welcome to the future of customer growth. Join us as we shape the future of rewards in financial services!

About Platform Engineering

Platform Engineering experiments, design, builds & operates the core data & workflows layer that connects Ascenda's myriad product systems and sub-services together. Platform Engineering simplifies the operational efficiency of building applications within the Ascenda ecosystem through the roll out of shared services, tooling, training & operational support to the various teams and applications within Ascenda.

Platform Engineering is also responsible for the experiments and work to add flexibility, scalability & simplicity to test and roll out new capabilities within our Engineering stack to enable the capture of other product verticals and market segments for services we sell. Examples include

• Orchestrating improvements to multi-tenant onboarding and change configuration management across applications & regional deployments
• Building new batch data processing capabilities to capture the more traditional file/ batch data integration models that financial institutions need
• Rolling out the use of event-driven processing to manage fan-out and scaling problems for inter-service load problems
• Improving our ability to proactively detect session fraud & compromised user accounts
  
  

Our engineers work directly with our other engineering teams to onboard them onto our platform systems, reviewing and recommending design and architectural decisions, and guiding our engineering teams on how to implement the tooling provided by the larger Platform organization required to ensure systems can scale and react to changing conditions, with continuous improvement loops.

About Engineering Manager Role

As an Engineering Manager, you'll own a team that enables workflows for multi-tenant client, establishes and enforces data workflow + security constraints, develops workflows enabling a first class client management experience, and facilitates self-serve management and usage metering critical to scaling Ascenda's business (through various use cases like monitoring, metering & reporting).

In this role, you will integrate simplicity, scalability, security and operations deeply into the software lifecycle while balancing the need for user (and developer) friendliness. Our engineers, end-users & clients wants our platforms to be simple, transparent and flexible to scale and your team's work will deliver that.

You care deeply about your team, invest in their personal growth and support them in maximising their impact to the business. You love developing, coaching and growing people across different subject areas and crafts. You can effectively develop a high-trust, inclusive environment within the team.

You are empathetic to user pain and able to convert it to opinions about the UX of the product. Critically, you enjoy experimenting, pushing boundaries and can help to bring the rest of the organisation along to the future growth opportunities that'll help Ascenda win in the market.

You are able to make the right prioritisation calls, even if hard, based on business requirements, team needs, and staffing availability. Even though you don't spend a large percentage of time coding, you contribute to the code base when needed.

Responsibilities

• Architect and develop our core platforms (data processing, events, billing, authorizations) to support a high volume of transactions, handling millions of transactions daily.
• Strategise improvements to our organisational application & data workflows, enhancing flexibility to accommodate future platform needs.
• Collaborate with the DevOps team to optimise performance and requirements of hi-throughput processing.
• Collaborate closely with various client-facing solution architects to design implementations tailored to our customers needs.
• Partner with senior engineers to build and champion a long-term tech roadmap to reduce operational burden, ensure scalability, reduce risk, and push the team towards step-changes in operational sustainability
• Identify and grow engineers & leaders within the teams, building in strong platform & product mindset to help scale our business, setting them up for success through mentorship and coaching
• Collaborate across teams to prioritize, build and align strategies that improve Ascenda ability to scale
  
  

What We're Looking For

• Demonstrated experience leading cross-team engineering efforts from analysis of requirements and scoping, shipping, to operating in production
• Deep systems background and value technical excellence. Delivers well-engineered and durable solutions, leading technical discussions, design, and code reviews
• Ability to partner effectively with other teams in the organization across engineering, business development, information security, etc.
• Ability to run a high-paced platform team across multiple locations and timezones, and react effectively to changes in global prioritization
• 6+ years in software engineering or similar role. Experience contributing to the system design or architecture (architecture, design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems.
• 3+ years of leadership experience. Demonstrated track record of successful mentorship and accelerating reports growth, being an effective force multiplier for the team.
  
  

What Matters At Ascenda

We are passionate, we keep things simple, we focus on results, we work together & we innovate!

We Have a Rewarding Working Place That Provides a

• High growth environment & exponential career development
• Mobile & flexible work environment
• Competitive compensation
• Travel perks & Employee rewards
  
  

Ascenda is an equal opportunity employer, committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace.