At Playlist, life's richest moments happen when people step away from screens to move, connect, explore, and play. We're building the definitive platform for intentional living, connecting people with inspiring experiences in fitness, wellness, and beyond. With popular brands like Mindbody and ClassPass, Playlist empowers businesses and individuals, making it effortless for aspirations to become actions. Join us in reshaping technology's role to foster meaningful, real-world connections.
Mindbody equips wellness entrepreneurs with technology to support thriving businesses and create exceptional experiences. Innovation and curiosity drive our culture, connecting businesses and individuals through cutting-edge solutions. Join us if you're passionate about enhancing wellness through technology.
The Role You’ll Play:
The Director of Engineering for the Payments Pillar will lead one of Playlist's most strategic and revenue-critical engineering organizations. Payments drives 40% of Playlist's total revenue and serves as a key retention lever—merchants using our payments solutions retain 40% better than those who don't. This role is responsible for building and scaling the engineering teams, architecture, and delivery capability that power payments across all Playlist brands (Mindbody, Booker, ClassPass, Kite, and future acquisitions). You'll lead multiple squads focused on international expansion, reliability and modernization, merchant experience, embedded finance, and platform orchestration—driving execution across distributed teams in the US and India.
- Partner with Pillar co-leads, Product, and cross-functional stakeholders to define and execute the multi-year Payments strategy, balancing international expansion, reliability improvements, merchant experience, and platform modernization
- Build and lead high-performing teams of 5-7 Engineering Managers and 60-80+ engineers across squads including International PSP Integrations, Payments Core/Reliability, Merchant Experience, Embedded Finance, Point of Sale, and NA Payments
- Architect and build Playlist Payments Platform (PPP)—a unified payments orchestration layer serving all Playlist products—enabling build-once, deploy-everywhere capabilities and eventual standalone market offering
- Drive regional PSP integrations (SEA, MENA), compliance in priority markets, and "Rest of World" solutions to achieve 85%+ global merchant coverage by end of 2026
- Deliver on critical metrics including payments attach rate, success rate (>90%), merchant experience score, international GMV growth, and ARPS lift through embedded finance products
- Lead technical modernization efforts including migration from legacy ASP to .NET 8, POS refactoring to Next.js, PSP orchestration layer buildout, and architectural improvements to reduce unreconciled transactions
- Establish and maintain clean ownership boundaries between Payments and Consumer/Growth pillars, reducing late-stage friction and enabling autonomous parallel delivery
- Champion software development best practices, establish squad-level metrics for quality and velocity, and drive architectural decisions for scale and reliability
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Experience You Bring:
- 10+ years in software engineering with at least 5+ years leading engineering teams (ideally 50+ engineers), including multiple Engineering Managers
- Deep payments/fintech expertise with direct experience building and scaling payments systems, PSP integrations, payment orchestration, compliance frameworks (PCI-DSS), or embedded finance products
- Proven track record of delivering complex, multi-quarter technical initiatives across distributed teams, balancing innovation with operational stability
- Experience managing engineering teams across time zones (US + India or similar), building strong culture and collaboration across geographies
- Strong understanding of payments domain including card networks, payment gateways, tokenization, settlement/reconciliation, chargebacks, fraud/risk, and merchant onboarding (KYC/KYB)
- Experience with modern cloud architecture (AWS/Azure/GCP), microservices, APIs, event-driven systems, and familiarity with compliance and security requirements (PCI-DSS, SOC 2, GDPR)
- Ability to translate business goals into technical strategy, sequence work effectively, and make build vs. buy vs. partner tradeoffs with strong communication skills to influence stakeholders at all levels
- Track record of attracting, retaining, and growing engineering talent while championing diversity and inclusion and building psychologically safe, high-trust teams
Sound like the role for you? We’d love to hear from you! Even if you’re not 100% sure about potential fit, we still encourage you to apply. We’re looking for the right person, not the perfect series of checkboxes.
Playlist is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We highly value diversity at our company and encourage people of all different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives to apply. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or other protected characteristics.
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Note: This description outlines key responsibilities but isn’t intended to cover every task or duty. Additional responsibilities may be assigned as needed to support the team and business goals.
