Director, Engineering
At Playlist, life's richest moments happen when people step away from screens to move, connect, explore, and play. We're building the definitive platform for intentional living, connecting people with inspiring experiences in fitness, wellness, and beyond. With popular brands like Mindbody and ClassPass, Playlist empowers businesses and individuals, making it effortless for aspirations to become actions. Join us in reshaping technology's role to foster meaningful, real-world connections.
Mindbody equips wellness entrepreneurs with technology to support thriving businesses and create exceptional experiences. Innovation and curiosity drive our culture, connecting businesses and individuals through cutting-edge solutions. Join us if you're passionate about enhancing wellness through technology.
The Role You'll Play
The Director of Engineering for the Payments Pillar will lead one of Playlist's most strategic and revenue-critical engineering organizations. Payments drives a major part of Playlist's total revenue and serves as a key retention lever—merchants using our payments solutions retain better than those who don't. You'll build and scale the engineering teams, architecture, and delivery capability that power payments across all Playlist brands (Mindbody, Booker, ClassPass, Kite, and future acquisitions). This is a highly visible role requiring both technical depth in payments/fintech and exceptional leadership skills to drive execution across distributed teams.
- Partner with Pillar co-leads, Product, and cross-functional stakeholders to define and execute the multi-year Payments strategy, balancing international expansion, reliability improvements, merchant experience, and platform modernization
- Own critical business outcomes including payments attach rate, success rate, merchant experience score, international GMV growth, and ARPS lift through embedded finance products
- Build and lead high-performing teams of 5-7 Engineering Managers and 60-80+ engineers across payment squads in the US and India
- Champion software development best practices, establish squad-level metrics for quality and velocity, and drive architectural decisions for scale and reliability
- Balance parallel workstreams across payment methods expansion, reliability/modernization, and embedded finance validation—ensuring sequencing clarity and delivery confidence
- Lead technical modernization efforts including migration from legacy ASP to .NET 8, PSP orchestration layer buildout, and architectural improvements to improve stability
- Influence stakeholders at all levels (ELT, Board, cross-functional partners) to build alignment and drive strategic initiatives forward
- Foster a collaborative, high-trust team culture across geographies that attracts, retains, and develops world-class engineering talent
Experience You Bring
- 10+ years in software engineering with at least 5+ years leading engineering teams of 50+ people, including multiple Engineering Managers
- Deep payments/fintech expertise with direct experience building and scaling payments systems, PSP integrations, payment orchestration, compliance frameworks (PCI-DSS), or embedded finance products
- Proven track record delivering complex, multi-quarter technical initiatives across distributed teams, balancing innovation with operational stability
- Experience managing engineering teams across time zones (US + India or similar), building strong culture and collaboration across geographies
- Technical depth with hands-on background as a senior engineer or architect, able to dive into system design, code reviews, and technical decision-making when needed
- Strong understanding of payments domain including card networks, payment gateways, tokenization, settlement/reconciliation, chargebacks, fraud/risk, and merchant onboarding (KYC/KYB)
- Experience with modern cloud architecture (AWS/Azure/GCP), microservices, APIs, event-driven systems, and familiarity with PCI-DSS, SOC 2, GDPR, and regional payment regulations
- Strategic thinking with ability to translate business goals into technical strategy, sequence work effectively, and make build vs. buy vs. partner tradeoffs
Have we piqued your curiosity?
Sound like the role for you? We’d love to hear from you! Even if you’re not 100% sure about potential fit, we still encourage you to apply. We’re looking for the right person, not the perfect series of checkboxes.
The Company is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We highly value diversity at our company and encourage people of all different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives to apply. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or other protected characteristics.
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Note: This description outlines key responsibilities but isn’t intended to cover every task or duty. Additional responsibilities may be assigned as needed to support the team and business goals.