Engineering Manager (Cardworks/Kayaaku)

About The Opportunity

As part of an ongoing fractional HR partnership, One People Team (OPT) is working alongside a growing organisation in Malaysia to scale its digital payments platforms and engineering capabilities.

The organisation builds financial platforms powering digital payments and fintech services across Malaysia and the region. As adoption of digital wallets, card products, and embedded financial services continues to grow, there is a need to strengthen platform scalability, reliability, and engineering standards.

This role offers the opportunity to lead engineering for a core cards and wallet platform, shaping backend systems and infrastructure that support payment processing, integrations, and partner ecosystems.

About The Role

You will lead the development of a cards and wallet payment platform, covering both Cardworks and Kayaaku capabilities.

This role combines engineering leadership, backend architecture, and system design, ensuring the platform remains scalable, reliable, and secure as it continues to grow.

You will lead a team of engineers responsible for building and operating core backend systems powering prepaid cards, digital wallets, merchant payments, integrations with payment networks, and SDKs and APIs used by partners.

The role requires strong technical depth and the ability to guide engineers in designing robust financial infrastructure systems.

Why This Role Matters

The platform sits at the core of the organisation’s digital payments ecosystem and is strategically important for future growth.

It represents a differentiated opportunity within the market, enabling businesses to access a white-label cards and wallets ecosystem and build their own financial products on top of a shared platform.

As adoption increases, the platform must support high transaction volumes, strong security standards, and complex integrations with financial systems, while also delivering strong developer and end-user experiences.

This role ensures engineering teams design and build systems that are scalable, resilient, and capable of supporting the next generation of payment products.

Key Responsibilities

Engineering Leadership

• Lead and mentor a team of backend engineers building the platform.
• Create a strong engineering culture focused on ownership, reliability, and technical excellence.
• Guide engineers in making sound architectural and design decisions.

Backend Platform Development

• Drive development of backend services and platform infrastructure supporting digital wallets, prepaid cards, and payment processing.
• Ensure systems are built for high availability, scalability, and security.
• Collaborate closely with product and infrastructure teams to deliver new payment features.

System Architecture & Design

• Design distributed systems capable of supporting large-scale payment processing and financial transactions.
• Define technical architecture and best practices for platform development.
• Ensure strong integration with payment networks, banking systems, and fintech platforms.

Platform Reliability & Performance

• Ensure the platform maintains strong transaction reliability, performance, and operational stability.
• Implement monitoring, alerting, and operational practices to support production systems.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work closely with product, security, and infrastructure teams to deliver new capabilities.
• Collaborate with engineering teams across the organisation to align on architecture and standards.

Key Requirements

Strong Backend Engineering Background

• 6+ years of experience in backend or platform engineering, ideally in fintech, payments, or large-scale systems.
• Strong experience with distributed systems, APIs, and backend architectures.

Engineering Leadership Experience

• Experience leading engineering teams or acting as a technical lead for complex systems.
• Ability to mentor engineers and drive technical excellence across the team.
• The role emphasises capability and potential over absolute years of experience.

System Design Expertise

• Strong understanding of system architecture, scalability, reliability, and fault tolerance.
• Experience designing and operating systems that handle high transaction volumes.

Payments or Financial Systems Experience (Preferred)

• Experience working with payment systems, card processing, or financial platforms is highly beneficial.
• Familiarity with payment networks, transaction flows, or fintech infrastructure is an advantage.

Technical Breadth

• Experience with modern backend frameworks, microservices architectures, and cloud infrastructure.
• Understanding of security, data integrity, and compliance considerations in financial systems.
• Strong familiarity with AI coding tools and frameworks such as Claude and Cursor.

Expected Outcome From This Role

• Strengthen the backend architecture and scalability of the Cardworks/Kayaaku platform.
• Build and lead a high-performing engineering team responsible for payment infrastructure.
• Improve platform reliability, performance, and system observability.
• Deliver new platform capabilities supporting digital wallets, card products, and payment integrations.
• Establish strong engineering standards and system design practices across the team.