Sr. Engineering Manager - Payments

About the role

Cedar is expanding its product offerings and at the center of all that we do is payments. We are evolving our payment capabilities and payment platform to support our new offerings at scale. We need a Sr. Engineering Manager to help make this platform evolution successful. This role will lead two Payments teams through a combination of individual contributors and engineering managers.

What you'll work on

• Our payments platform is currently tightly coupled to business logic in ways that make it difficult to scale across multiple product lines.
• We have opportunities to improve observability for our systems to understand system health, diagnose issues quickly, and improve the payment experience.
• You will lead the solving of both categories of challenges.
• The Payments Pillar's scope extends beyond the payments platform. You will help enable Cedar's payment capabilities in agentic workflows, improve performance across the Payments funnel, own the engineering partnership with third-party payment vendor integrations, and partner with Product and Commercial to evaluate and prioritize client payment feature requests.
• You will work closely with staff and principal engineers to shape technical direction, evaluate tradeoffs, challenge assumptions, and bring an independent point of view. You do not need to be the primary architect or write code every day, but you should be comfortable engaging deeply in design reviews and technical decisions, deeply understanding your services, and taking accountability for outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Partner with staff and principal engineers to lead the Payments Pillar through the evolution of Cedar's Payments architecture, including decoupling payment capabilities from business logic so they can scale across multiple product lines and workflows.
• Lead, coach and develop Engineering Managers and individual contributors across the Payments Pillar, and support a high-performing and inclusive engineering culture.
• Establish and improve the metrics and instrumentation used to understand performance across payment features and workflows.
• Partner with Product and Commercial to balance new payment capabilities and performance improvements with foundational architecture and operational investments.
• Own the engineering relationship and technical outcomes for third-party payment vendor integrations.
• Identify opportunities to and lead initiatives that enable multiple teams to deliver results more effectively.

Must-have qualifications

• 8+ years of professional experience.
• 3+ years of engineering management experience.
• Experience managing managers.
• Experience owning third-party vendor integrations.
• Experience owning business-critical production systems and their performance, reliability, and operational health.
• Strong cross-functional partnership skills, especially with Product and Commercial stakeholders.
• The ability to make sound judgments and advocate for the right balance between moving quickly, experimenting, and investing in foundational quality.
• Clear, proactive communication and a track record of navigating ambiguity, tradeoffs, and competing priorities.
• A commitment to holding a high bar for team execution and supporting the growth of engineers and engineering managers.
• Excitement about Cedar's mission and a passion for improving the healthcare financial experience.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience in payments, fintech, or a closely related domain.
• Experience modernizing or decoupling complex production systems.
• Experience supporting agentic or AI-enabled workflows at scale.
• Experience driving the adoption of agentic development practices and AI-assisted tooling to accelerate team velocity.

Pay

Salary Range: $221,000-$260,000. This role is also equity eligible.

Benefits

• Unlimited PTO for vacation, sick and mental health days–we encourage everyone to take at least 20 days of vacation per year.
• 16 weeks paid parental leave with health benefits for all parents, plus flexible re-entry schedules for returning to work.
• Diversity initiatives including three employee resource groups: be@cedar (for BIPOC-identifying Cedarians and their allies), Pridecones (for LGBTQIA+ Cedarians and their allies) and Cedar Women+ (for female-identifying Cedarians).
• Competitive pay, equity (for qualifying roles), and health benefits, including fertility & adoption assistance, that start on the first of the month following your start date (or on your start date if your start date coincides with the first of the month).
• Cedar matches 100% of your 401(k) contributions, up to 3% of your annual compensation.
• Access to hands-on mentorship, employee and management coaching, and a team discretionary budget for learning and development resources.