Own reliability outcomes across your teams — set the incident response and postmortem standards your managers follow, and step in personally on the most severe or cross-team incidents
Stay technically credible across multiple codebases or domains: participate in architecture reviews at a higher altitude, and know when to go deep versus trust your team members' judgment
Drive AI adoption across multiple teams — set targets, track adoption and impact, and share what's working across the teams you lead
Advise your senior engineers on moderately complex technical and people matters, without doing their job for them
Modify and execute policies that affect your area of the organization, and recommend changes that should apply more broadly
Communicate regularly with senior and peer leadership on matters spanning several teams, functions, or customers
Own budget and headcount planning for your area, balancing near-term delivery against longer-term investment
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 for backend and Angular for frontend — enough depth to evaluate trade-offs across multiple codebases and coach your team on technical judgment
Gen AI / LLM tooling — fluent enough to set adoption strategy and evaluate tool or vendor choices across multiple teams
Low-latency systems — familiar enough to guide design decisions and set the technical bar across teams working on transaction processing or high-throughput systems
Microservices & APIs — solid enough grounding to review cross-team architecture decisions and API contracts
Containers & Kubernetes — working knowledge sufficient to evaluate infrastructure decisions across multiple teams
Cloud platforms — working familiarity with Azure; exposure to AWS a plus
CI/CD & DevOps — comfortable evaluating pipeline standards across teams, not just one
What You Bring
You don't need to check every box below to apply — if most of this resonates, we want to hear from you.
9+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 2+ years managing other managers, tech leads, or multiple teams directly
Strong critical thinking applied across a broader, less clearly-defined set of problems — you're comfortable when principles alone don't fully apply
Strong systems thinking across multiple teams' systems, spotting where complexity crosses team boundaries
Solid grounding in SaaS and cloud-native fundamentals, applied at a multi-team level
Genuine curiosity that drives you to dig into problems that don't have a strategic direction yet
A track record of leading through other leaders — developing managers and senior ICs, not just individual engineers
Strong understanding of software architecture across multiple systems or domains
Working familiarity with major cloud platforms, container orchestration, and CI/CD at a multi-team scale
A track record of using AI-assisted engineering as a lever across a broader organization
Demonstrated ability to persuade senior stakeholders in sensitive or complex situations while preserving relationships
Excellent communication with executives, peers, and the teams several levels below you
Bonus Points
Experience in payments, financial services, or another regulated industry
Experience managing distributed or remote teams across multiple time zones
A track record of turning around an underperforming team or function
Experience owning a departmental budget
What We Offer
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
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
Equal Opportunity & Compliance
ACI Worldwide is an Equal Opportunity Employer; all qualified applicants are considered without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status. This role requires adherence to ACI's Code of Business Conduct and Ethics, and — given access to sensitive payment data — compliance with applicable security and data-protection standards (PCI-DSS, SOC 2, GDPR, CCPA). Comprehensive background screening is required. Responsibilities may evolve with business needs.
