ACI Worldwide
From ACI Worldwide's careers page
Status: listed on the employer's own careers page when we last checked (daily). Confirm on their site before applying.
Here, you’ll collaborate, innovate, and grow in a global technology environment where your work makes a visible impact.
Manager, Software Engineering
Employment Type: Full-time
Powering the World’s Payments Ecosystem
ACI Worldwide powers the payments ecosystem globally, and our people power ACI. Here, you’ll collaborate, innovate, and grow in a global technology environment where your work makes a visible impact.
As a Manager, Software Engineering, you will lead a talented engineering team supporting our Product Engineering team. You’ll combine people leadership, technical understanding, and delivery management to build secure, reliable, and high-quality software solutions. As Manager, Software Engineering, you'll lead the engineers who build and run it — on infrastructure that is evolving toward cloud-native as our end goal, with AI-assisted engineering practices built into how the team works day to day, not treated as a separate initiative.
Own delivery for ACI products end to end — plan and prioritize work that keeps commitments aligned with team and organizational goals, and remove the blockers that get in the way
Lead and grow a team of 10-15 full-time engineers: hire, onboard, run 1-on-1s and performance reviews, and create a climate where people are motivated to do their best work, not just show up. Overall span of control may extend beyond this range once contractor staff augmentation is factored in – and you’re accountable not just for filling the team, but for hiring quality: the long-term performance of the people you bring in
Own your team’s delivery and quality trends – deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and MTTR - participate in sprint planning and retrospectives, and hold the team accountable to commitments without becoming a bottleneck yourself
Stay technically credible: participate in architecture discussions, review designs and code, and maintain enough hands-on comfort with where the team’s infrastructure stands today and where it is headed (cloud-native, Kubernetes/OpenShift, major cloud providers) to have a real technical opinion
Own reliability outcomes for your team’s systems – you’re accountable for customer-impacting incidents on your watch, and for ensuring postmortems produce tracked, measurable follow-through, not just a conversation
Use AI-assisted engineering tools yourself, and own AI adoption outcomes across your team – adoption rate, measurable impact on cycle time and quality – not just advocacy for the tools existing
Coach and develop your engineers' careers — identifying growth opportunities, giving direct feedback, and mentoring the team through technical and professional challenges
Communicate clearly with product, design, and other engineering teams, and represent your team's technical perspective to stakeholders who don't share your context
Partner with other engineering managers on cross-team technical initiatives spanning ACI's cloud infrastructure and platform investments
Our Tech Stack
You don't need full hands-on competency in this stack, but you should be fluent enough to review designs, make staffing calls, and comfortable enough to earn credibility with the team building on it.
Java / Spring ecosystem — enough depth to review designs and evaluate trade-offs in a Java / Spring Boot codebase (modern Java 17+, concurrency, performance considerations), without needing to write production code daily
Gen AI / LLM tooling — enough fluency with LLM APIs, RAG patterns, and AI coding assistants to review technical approaches and evaluate tool or vendor choices, without needing to build with them daily
Low-latency systems — familiar enough with the demands of transaction processing, payments, or equivalent high-throughput distributed systems to guide design decisions and set the right technical bar
Microservices & APIs — solid grounding in RESTful and event-driven service design, and in the trade-offs around API versioning, backward compatibility, and contract testing, to review architecture decisions confidently
Containers & Kubernetes — working knowledge of containerized applications running on Kubernetes (AKS, EKS, GKE, or OpenShift) — enough to evaluate designs and make informed staffing decisions
Cloud platforms — working familiarity with [Primary provider]; exposure to [secondary providers] a plus
CI/CD & DevOps — comfortable evaluating pipeline design and quality gates (e.g., [Jenkins/GitHub Actions/etc.], [Gradle/Maven/etc.]), even without being hands-on building pipelines yourself
You don't need to check every box below to apply — if most of this resonates, we want to hear from you.
6–10 years of professional software engineering experience with demonstrated leadership experience – as a people manager, tech lead, or mentor guiding other engineers
Strong critical thinking — you frame decisions clearly, weigh explicit trade-offs rather than defaulting to the familiar option, and adjust your thinking as new information comes in, especially under pressure or ambiguity
Strong systems thinking — you reason about how components interact and where failure or complexity will emerge upstream and downstream, not just within the piece you're touching
Solid grounding in SaaS and cloud-native fundamentals — the underlying principles, not just familiarity with the tools, even where our own infrastructure is still catching up to them
Genuine curiosity — you ask why, you're not satisfied with 'it works,' and you bring creative approaches to problems that don't have an obvious answer yet
A proven track record delivering software through teams using agile/scrum practices, with experience planning and prioritizing work against competing commitments
Strong understanding of software architecture, system design, APIs, and microservices — enough to stay credible in technical discussions
Working familiarity with a major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP), container orchestration (Kubernetes/OpenShift), and modern CI/CD pipelines
Active use of AI-assisted development tools in your own workflow, not just awareness that they exist
A genuine track record of developing people — coaching, giving feedback, and helping engineers grow their careers
Excellent communication with technical and non-technical audiences, and strong conflict-resolution skills
Bonus Points
Experience in payments, financial services, or another regulated industry
Experience managing distributed or remote teams .
A track record of improving team velocity and delivery metrics through data-driven decisions
Experience building hiring pipelines and growing a team from the ground up
Lead engineering for a platform processing mission-critical payment transactions for financial institutions worldwide
Be part of a truly global product development organization — real centers of engineering excellence spread across multiple regions, organized around product families and technical capabilities rather than geography for its own sake, with engineers everywhere shaping our core products and technical direction, not providing support from the sidelines
A cloud-native, automation-first engineering culture that treats quality, security, and developer experience as competitive advantages, not compliance checkboxes
Real leadership growth — ACI actively develops managers into senior engineering leaders; your trajectory here is yours to define
An organization that holds managers accountable for AI adoption outcomes, not just tool advocacy — you'll have real latitude to drive that
Hybrid model — typically 2–3 days in-office across ACI's global hub locations
Some domestic and international travel (10–15%) for team meetings, conferences, or cross-site collaboration
Flexible schedule, with occasional extended hours around critical releases or team needs
Core Capabilities
Ensure Accountability
Drive Results
Customer Focus
Cultivate Innovation
Collaborate
Courage
Work Authorization
Applicants must be currently authorized to work in India on a full-time basis. This position does not offer employment visa or work permit sponsorship now or in the future.
Join Us
We offer opportunities for professional growth, career development, and a competitive compensation and benefits package in an innovative and collaborative global environment.
Ready to help transform the payments ecosystem? Learn more at the ACI Worldwide website.
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