Senior Software Engineering Manager - Payments

Job Description

About the role

Payments are critical to BT Group’s commercial performance, underpinning billions of pounds of transaction value each year across BT, EE, Plusnet and Openreach. The reliability, scalability and security of our payment systems directly impact revenue, customer trust, and regulatory compliance.

As Senior Software Engineering Manager, you are accountable for the engineering leadership of our payments platform estate, including BT Pay — our strategic payments-as-a-service platform. You will lead and scale high-performing, cross-functional engineering squads responsible for building, evolving and operating resilient, secure, and high-throughput payment systems.

This role is pivotal in ensuring our platforms are not only stable and performant today but also engineered for future scale and transformation. You will drive engineering excellence across system design, delivery and operations, improving platform reliability, accelerating change, and enabling seamless customer payment journeys across BT’s digital ecosystem.

What you’ll be doing

• Lead and scale multiple cross-functional engineering squads responsible for the design, build and operation of BT Group’s strategic payments platforms, including BT Pay.
• Own the engineering delivery of high-quality, resilient and secure payment systems, ensuring services meet the demands of scale, availability and regulatory compliance.
• Drive engineering excellence across system design, code quality, testing and operability, embedding standards that enable predictable, high-quality delivery.
• Define and execute the technical roadmap for your domain, aligning to wider platform strategy and balancing immediate delivery needs with long-term transformation.
• Act as a senior technical leader, shaping architectural decisions and technology choices across the payments ecosystem, with a focus on scalability, modularity and reuse.
• Build and develop high-performing teams through strong leadership, coaching and talent development, ensuring the right capabilities are in place to deliver critical outcomes.

Essential Skills / Experience

• Significant experience leading multiple engineering teams in complex, high-scale environments, with accountability for delivery and live service performance.
• Strong track record designing and operating distributed, cloud-based systems (AWS), including integration with legacy/on-prem platforms.
• Proven experience delivering large-scale platform transformation (e.g. cloud migration, legacy modernisation), applying modern architectural principles (microservices, event-driven, API-first).
• Experience building and operating resilient, secure, highly available systems, with a strong focus on observability and operational excellence.
• Strong engineering leadership capability — building high-performing teams, embedding DevOps ownership, and aligning technical direction to business outcomes in regulated or high-risk environments.

Desirable Skills / Experience

• Payments or fintech platform experience, particularly high-volume transaction systems.
• Experience migrating from legacy payment platforms to modern, cloud-based services.
• Hands-on AWS and cloud-native tooling (containers, serverless, CI/CD, infrastructure as code).
• Experience with SRE practices (SLIs/SLOs, incident management, reliability engineering).
• Track record improving engineering productivity through tooling, automation or AI-assisted development.
• Experience navigating large, complex organisations and senior stakeholders.

Our Package

• An annual bonus of up to 15% (company & personal performance dependent)
• Annual car allowance or cash equivalent
• Private healthcare for you and your family
• BT Pension scheme: minimum 5% employee contribution, BT contribution 10%.
• EE Broadband – from £10/month for 150Mb and £20 for 900Mb – lower than any other provider.
• EE Mobile – Save 50% on Mobile & SIM-only plans or pay just £10/month for an EE SIM.
• EE TV – Enjoy premium content like Netflix and TNT Sports, with the flexibility to swap packages monthly, starting from just £10/month.
• Combine Broadband, TV, and Mobile from just £30/month and unlock extra savings when you take both Broadband and Mobile.
• There’s also great support for working parents, including pay whilst on maternity, adoptive, and paternity leave.
• 25 days annual leave (not including bank holidays), increasing with service.
• Volunteering days, so you can give back to your local community.
• Brand new electric vehicle salary sacrifice arrangement, known as ‘My EV’.

BT Group is the UK’s leading communications group and the holding company behind some of the country’s most recognised brands – including BT, EE, Openreach and Plusnet. Our purpose is as simple as it is ambitious: we connect for good. Our customers include consumers, small, medium and large businesses, public sector organisations and other communications providers.

BT Group’s role is about setting direction, unlocking value and creating the conditions for our brands and businesses to thrive.

Having come through the most capital-intensive phase of our fibre investment, our focus now is on what comes next – simplifying how we operate, using technology and AI to work smarter, and organising ourselves to serve customers better and grow sustainably. Group teams shape strategy, policy, brand, capital allocation and transformation, helping the whole organisation perform at its best.

We have a singular culture that unites all our people: we are customer-first challengers, who are committed, clear and connected. These behaviours unite us as one team to deliver for our colleagues, our customers, our stakeholders and the country. Joining BT Group means working at the heart of a business that matters to the UK, with the opportunity to shape decisions, influence outcomes and help set the future course of one of the country’s most important companies.