Engineering Manager - Customer Risk

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.

 

About the role

We are seeking an enthusiastic and experienced Engineering Manager to build and lead a brand-new Customer Risk Team within the Risk Intelligence and Monitoring Group. This critical role is focused on the architecture, delivery, and scaling of full-stack engineering solutions that proactively manage customer risk.

You will be responsible for defining the team's technical roadmap, making key architectural decisions, and ensuring the delivery of high-quality, reliable, and scalable systems. Crucially, you will need a strong track record of navigating and delivering complex, ambiguous projects from inception to production. While future capabilities will likely incorporate Machine Learning, we prioritize a manager with strong engineering fundamentals who can own the architecture and delivery first, and build the team on ML later.

 

The Opportunity

Adyen is rapidly building out its AI-driven customer risk capabilities across its massive global platform. As a manager in the Risk Intelligence and Monitoring Group, you will be at the forefront of this. This team is essential for maintaining a low-friction experience for millions of genuine business owners while proactively detecting and mitigating risks.

 

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and grow: Build, mentor, and lead a high-performing team of software engineers, data engineering and ML Engineers fostering a culture of ownership, collaboration, and continuous learning.
• Architectural ownership: Define and own the architecture for the Customer Risk systems, ensuring they are scalable, reliable, and have low latency.
• Strategic delivery: Drive the planning and execution of ambiguous and complex engineering projects, translating high-level business problems into actionable technical roadmaps and successful delivery.
• Engineering excellence: Champion best practices in software engineering, testing, system design, and operations.
• Cross-functional collaboration: Partner closely with Product Managers, Data Scientists, Compliance, and Operations teams to understand risk challenges and deliver impactful solutions.
• Technology strategy: Evaluate and drive the adoption of new technologies and frameworks to solve real-world business challenges, ensuring the technology stack supports both current and future (including ML) needs.
  

 

Requirements

• Proven experience in leading, managing, and mentoring engineering teams.
• Strong track record (e.g., 5+ years) in software engineering, with deep expertise in system design, architecture, and development of scalable, reliable, and low-latency systems.
• Ability to architect and oversee development across the full stack (data, backend services, and a solid understanding of how services integrate).
• Demonstrated ability to drive delivery and set technical direction for complex projects with ill-defined or ambiguous requirements.
• Strong programming proficiency in languages such as Java and/or Python. Experience with technologies like SQL and NoSQL databases, and distributed systems (e.g., Kafka).
• Experience in the financial crime, fraud, or customer risk domain is a distinct advantage, but not a prerequisite.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with a strong product sense and passion for applying technology to solve real business problems.
  

Why Adyen?

This is an exceptional opportunity to join a solid, established company with a startup mindset, characterized by small teams, direct communication, and work on important challenges. You’ll have direct access to massive global datasets (e.g., payments, identity data) and the ability to see your work have an immediate impact at scale. We offer an environment of ownership and speed, where a focused research team can make a significant difference. You will be at the forefront of bridging AI and fintech, shaping how these two critical areas intersect. We are looking for individuals who are eager to stay connected to the edge of innovation while ensuring we deliver practical value to our global platform.

 

About the Team

We work in the financial Crime and Fraud department. As a financial institute, we provide products to store and move finances. This comes at a risk. Fraudsters and criminals can misuse our platform to do financial crime like money laundering, and fraud like taking funds that do not belong to them. We need to be one step ahead of the fraudsters and we are also liable to report any detection of financial crime. We leverage our huge amount of data to identify actors using our platform, mitigate crime and catch fraud cases without creating friction for our genuine customers. In order to do this in a scalable and reliable manner, we have teams dedicated to figuring out the customer behind any event that goes through Adyen, do risk assessment, and make good judgement in real time as well as after the event has taken place. Day to day we work with Java, Postgres, Cassandra, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Big Data Platform, Machine Learning to equip ourselves with the right tools. 

 

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.