Mgr Software Engineering

Manager, Software Engineering

Location

Bangalore, India

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.

What You’ll Do

• + 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

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.

• 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 (Kub