Engineering Director – Head of Cards & Lending Domain

Job Title: Engineering Director – Head of Cards & Lending Domain

Department: Technology

Reports To: Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Location: Bucharest (On-site)

Role Summary

The Engineering Director for the Cards & Lending domain will lead the design, development, and delivery of critical banking products supporting our digital card issuance, card management, credit facilities, and lending ecosystem. As a key member of the Technology Leadership Team, this role ensures the domain’s technology strategy aligns with the bank’s business objectives, delivering secure, scalable, and high-performing platforms and mobile experiences. The role oversees mobile engineering (Android & iOS), backend engineering (Java, Kafka) and QA&E teams and drives excellence across engineering execution, quality, architecture, and delivery.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide strategic leadership for the Cards & Lending engineering teams, ensuring alignment with product and business goals.
• Lead end-to-end delivery of card issuance, transaction processing, loan origination, credit decisioning, and lifecycle management capabilities.
• Oversee engineering teams across mobile (Android and iOS) and backend platforms (Java microservices, Kafka event streaming).
• Define and enforce engineering best practices, coding standards, automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and secure coding principles.
• Collaborate closely with Product, Architecture, Risk, Operations, and Compliance to deliver robust and compliant financial products.
• Drive architectural decisions, modernization efforts, scalability improvements, and reliability enhancements for high-demand systems.
• Mentor, coach, and grow engineering managers, leads, and senior engineers; cultivate a high-performance engineering culture.
• Manage resource allocation, workforce planning, vendor relationships, and budget considerations.
• Ensure platform availability, security, and resiliency, including incident management and root-cause analysis.
• Champion innovation, engineering automation, and continuous improvement across the domain.

Required Qualifications & Experience

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in engineering leadership roles.
• Strong technical background in Java-based microservices, Kafka, cloud-native architectures, and mobile technologies (Android & iOS).
• Proven experience delivering card systems, lending platforms, or other core financial services technologies.
• Demonstrated success leading multi-disciplinary engineering teams in a fast-paced digital environment.
• Familiarity with regulatory and compliance requirements in financial services (e.g., PCI-DSS, lending regulations).
• Experience with DevOps, CI/CD, SRE/observability practices, and secure software development lifecycle.
• Strong stakeholder management, communication, and leadership capabilities.

Preferred Skills

• Experience in modern cloud ecosystems (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Background in scalable event-driven systems and distributed/modular architectures.
• Hands-on experience setting technology strategy and driving transformation initiatives.

What We Offer

• Opportunity to shape the future of a next-generation digital banking in Romania and Europe.
• Collaborative and innovative environment with strong executive support.
• Competitive compensation, benefits, and professional development opportunities.