Engineering Manager - Search-as-a-service

📋 Description

• • Adyen is a leading financial technology platform, empowering global giants like Meta, Uber, H&M, and Microsoft with a unified solution for payments, data, and financial products. We engineer ambition into everything we do, fostering an environment where individuals can thrive, own their careers, and tackle unique technical challenges at scale as a team. Our mission is to deliver innovative and ethical solutions that accelerate our customers' ambitions.
• • We are seeking an experienced Engineering Manager to spearhead our new Search-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering within the Platform Engineering organization. This pivotal role will be instrumental in establishing and scaling a dedicated, high-performing team in Bengaluru, responsible for the end-to-end ownership and operation of Elasticsearch clusters. These clusters are the backbone for business-critical, non-observability use cases, including customer-facing payment search and issuing search functions, handling immense search workloads with unwavering high availability and performance.
• • As the Engineering Manager, you will be the driving force behind the full lifecycle management of our Elasticsearch infrastructure. Your leadership will ensure a seamless, robust, and scalable managed search experience for all Adyen engineers, enabling them to leverage powerful search capabilities without the underlying complexity.
• • **Lead and Grow a High-Performing Search Platform Team:** You will directly manage a team of platform and infrastructure engineers, encompassing all experience levels. Your primary responsibility will be to nurture and develop this team, with a significant focus on building out our Bengaluru presence, while fostering close collaboration with our global tech hubs in Amsterdam and Chicago. You will own the day-to-day operations, including strategic planning, agile execution, and the setting of clear, achievable goals.
• • **Establish Structure and Process for Execution:** A key aspect of this role involves introducing and refining operational processes, robust frameworks, and effective ways of working. This will be crucial for enhancing our incident response capabilities, streamlining change management, and ensuring predictable, reliable delivery for our mission-critical, self-hosted Elasticsearch clusters, which operate on both bare-metal and Kubernetes environments.
• • **Cultivate a Culture of Technical Excellence:** You will champion a culture that prioritizes technical excellence and innovation. This includes ensuring that technical decisions are globally optimized, with a strong emphasis on automation. You will collaborate closely with global Platform Engineers and other technical leads to design, implement, and iterate on new Elasticsearch features, develop advanced automation tools, conduct performance tuning, and implement sophisticated regionalization strategies across our on-premise and Kubernetes infrastructures.
• • **Scale for Massive Growth and Resilience:** Guide your team to proactively address and overcome significant technical challenges. This includes conducting a comprehensive audit of existing non-observability clusters, architecting and building new Kubernetes clusters across all relevant regions, researching and implementing multi-data center active-active setups for enhanced disaster recovery and fault tolerance, enforcing effective data retention strategies, and establishing minimal-interruption upgrade paths with meticulously planned and agreed-upon maintenance windows.
• • **Integrate Search Best Practices into the SDLC:** Ensure that industry-leading Elasticsearch best practices are deeply embedded within the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). This encompasses guidance on optimal index design, query optimization techniques, robust security measures, and the creation of self-service endpoints. The goal is to provide Adyen engineers with a seamless, efficient, and secure "golden path" for utilizing search functionalities, characterized by straightforward credential delivery and significantly reduced configuration overhead.
• • **Drive Strategic Vision and Technical Direction:** Contribute to the broader platform engineering strategy by providing a strong engineering perspective specifically for search and infrastructure teams. You will be instrumental in shaping technical direction, driving improvements in reliability and performance, and ensuring the delivery of robust, scalable, and resilient solutions through a focus on automation, developer self-service, and regional resilience.
• • **Act as a Hands-On Leader:** While managing and growing a team, you will remain comfortable diving deep into technical discussions. Your ability to guide your team, validate critical technical decisions, and partner effectively with core infrastructure teams (compute, storage, network) will be essential for resolving complex issues across our datacenter, on-premise, and Kubernetes environments.