AI-Native Pod Leader

About Payoneer

Founded in 2005 Payoneer is the global financial platform that removes friction from doing business across borders with a mission to connect the worlds underserved businesses to a rising global economy. Were a community with over 2500 colleagues all over the world working to serve customers and partners in over 190 countries and territories.

By taking the complexity out of the financial workflowsincluding everything from global payments and compliance to multi-currency and workforce management to providing working capital and business intelligencewe give businesses the tools they need to work efficiently worldwide and grow with confidence.

Role summary

Location: Herzliya Tel Aviv District Israel
Hybrid / Full-time

The AI-Native Team Leader is a new kind of engineering leader at Payoneer equal parts technical authority people developer and AI-first builder. Youll lead a small AI Pod that owns its problems end-to-end: from understanding the business need through architecture and implementation to production monitoring. There are no hand-offs no tickets no specs thrown over a wall. Your team builds with AI as a primary tool ships fast and sets the methodology for how R&D works next.

What youll do

• Lead and develop a small 3-4 engineers AI Pod with a clear focus on their technical growth autonomy and delivery outcomes
• Provide technical authority hands-on code architect review and ship alongside your team
• Own the full delivery loop: understand the business problem define the solution architect it ship it monitor it no one hands you a spec
• Collaborate directly with Product Design/UX DevOps and business stakeholders to define decision logic risk thresholds and success metrics building capabilities not features
• Drive AI-native development Claude Code Cursor and whatever tools give your team the most leverage; build in a day what used to take a team a week
• Build the harness before you ship evaluation frameworks monitoring and observability go in on day one not after the first incident
• Be accountable for overall design architecture code quality and production environment across your team
• Set a higher technical bar run design reviews champion engineering best practices and push for continuous improvement in code quality and team craft
• Define the methodology this is early-stage work within Payoneer; you wont inherit a playbook youll write it

Who you are

• 5 years as a backend or full-stack engineer with real production experience youve watched systems run in the real world and fixed what breaks
• 2 years leading engineering teams youve grown people driven delivery and you know the difference between managing and developing engineers
• Experience shipping production AI systems agentic architectures orchestration multi-step workflows fallback and error logic; you think in workflows not endpoints
• Real fluency with AI coding tools not familiar with genuinely fast with them
• Strong eval instincts you define metrics build test sets and dont ship until you can measure; evaluation frameworks are part of the architecture not an afterthought
• Full-stack comfort you move from the prompt to the RAG pipeline to the orchestrator to the backend and back; you go where the right solution is
• Experienced and passionate about managing and growing people strong opinions held loosely; you make space for different perspectives and help the people around you grow
• Honest communicator you flag problems early give direct feedback and say what you actually think; experienced with engineering best practices (code reviews testing coverage agile methodologies)
• Grounded confidence you trust your abilities move forward with incomplete information make a call and own it; when youre wrong you update and move on

Not a must but a great advantage:

• Fintech or regulated-environment experience what matters is understanding why probably fine isnt acceptable when money is moving
• Experience with messaging systems such as Kafka RabbitMQ or SQS
• Experience building SaaS platforms in a cloud-based microservices environment
• Experience with frontend technologies such as React or Angular

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