Director of Engineering — Payments and Foundations

About Phorest

Phorest started in 2002 on a busy salon reception desk as a simple text-reminder tool.

Today Phorest builds software and AI-powered tools used by more than 155,000 hair, beauty and medspa professionals worldwide. We’re a product-led SaaS company solving real-world problems across bookings, payments, marketing and business management, with a big focus on building great experiences for both the businesses we serve and the people who use our products. Everything we build helps the salon and medspa industry thrive.

We're also a Certified B Corp, and 25% of the company is owned by Phoresters. When the company grows, everyone has a stake in that.

More about the team

Our ambition is to become the number one platform for premium hair, beauty and aesthetics businesses globally. For our Product & Engineering teams, that means understanding the people behind those businesses and building thoughtful, reliable products that make a real difference to how they work. We start with understanding what matters to the people using our products, and work together to solve problems that make a real difference to their businesses. You’ll thrive here if you enjoy operating in an environment that moves with pace, who brings energy and creates clarity and momentum as we scale.

The Opportunity

As we grow, the systems and infrastructure that power our business must scale with it. We’re looking for a Director of Engineering to lead Payments and Foundations: payments engineering, infrastructure, security, business systems, and internal AI enablement.

Your teams will be responsible for enabling scale, growing revenue, and protecting the business we have built. Payments is a significant contributor to revenue and a major part of our growth plans. Its quality and reliability matter to both our customers’ businesses and our own.

This role is also central to our internal scaling strategy: making it easier for our teams to deliver excellent service as Phorest grows. Connected systems, better workflows, and practical use of AI should help us onboard customers faster, resolve issues more effectively, and serve more customers without a proportional increase in operational effort.

Alongside leading your domain, you will partner with the CTO and fellow Director of Engineering in running the engineering organisation. You will help shape company strategy, challenge investment decisions, and drive delivery across team boundaries, working closely with Product, Finance, and Operations.

What you’ll do

You’ll lead through Heads of Engineering, Engineering Managers and senior technical leaders, setting direction, agreeing outcomes and ensuring teams have the clarity and autonomy to deliver. Your focus will be on developing strong leaders, making effective investment decisions and resolving the challenges that span multiple teams — not taking over day-to-day execution.

Payments Engineering

• Shape the direction of payments with Product and commercial leaders, making the engineering and investment decisions that increase adoption, grow revenue, and support expansion across markets.

• Hold payments leadership accountable for engineering quality and reliability across integrations, processing infrastructure, and money movement as transaction volumes grow.

• Ensure engineering leaders work effectively with Finance and Payments Operations on accurate billing, reconciliation, settlement visibility, and financial controls.

• Hold payment providers to clear service expectations and ensure payment systems meet relevant security and compliance requirements.

Internal Scaling and Service Excellence

• Shape and drive the engineering contribution to our internal scaling strategy, working with Operations and regional leaders to make excellent service easier to deliver as Phorest grows.

• Agree service improvements with your leaders and operational partners, and hold teams accountable for reducing bottlenecks, manual work, and unnecessary handoffs across onboarding, billing, and customer service.

• Ensure teams maintain reliable integrations and customer information, with internal tools that support growth across regions.

Platform Scalability and Health

• Set the direction for Phorest’s infrastructure, including AWS hosting strategy, capacity, performance, and cost.

• Hold engineering leaders accountable for observability and operational ownership so their teams detect and resolve problems before customers feel them.

• Ensure leaders maintain sustainable on-call practices, tested recovery plans, and effective incident follow-through, with clear priorities for upgrades and technical debt.

Internal AI Enablement

• Lead the team helping functions across Phorest adopt AI to improve productivity and service quality.

• Set priorities with functional leaders and support the AI enablement lead in making buy-or-build decisions and taking useful experiments into supported everyday use.

• Ensure the team owns adoption, training, and measurement of time saved and service improvement, with appropriate safeguards agreed with IT and Security.

Engineering Leadership and Company Strategy

• Partner with the CTO and fellow Director of Engineering on the running of engineering: planning, delivery reviews, investment, and visibility of performance and risk.

• Help shape and deliver company strategy, turning business priorities into engineering plans, resourcing decisions, and clear ownership.

• Lead shared priorities across groups, including quality, technical health, and ways of working. Resolve dependencies and ownership gaps rather than leaving teams to work around them.

Leadership and Team Development

• Lead and develop Heads of Engineering, Engineering Managers, and senior ICs. Build high-performing teams with clear ownership and consistent delivery.

• Share responsibility for hiring, talent reviews, promotions, and succession across engineering, working with People to maintain fair and consistent standards.

• Strengthen engineering culture, learning, and collaboration. Act on team-health feedback and hold your leaders accountable for following through.

IT Systems and Information Security

• Set security priorities and investment with the responsible leaders, based on risks to Phorest’s platform, customer data, and internal systems.

• Ensure IT leadership provides reliable company-wide services and access controls for a growing workforce.

• Hold leaders accountable for security and compliance practices, incident readiness, and mitigation of material risks.

Partner and Vendor Management

• Ensure technology and payment partnerships have clear owners accountable for service quality, commercial terms, and dependency risks.

• Set expectations for value from technology spend and intervene on negotiations or partner issues that need Director-level support.

Who You Are

You think from first principles to balance technical decisions with business impact. Decisive and calm under pressure, you empower leaders to act autonomously while maintaining clear alignment, accountability, and standards across teams.

What you’ll bring

Commercially minded and decisive under pressure, you understand how tech decisions impact customers and revenue. You engage confidently across architecture, investments, and strategy, setting clear direction while empowering leaders to act autonomously.

You’ll have

• 10+ years in software engineering, including 5+ in leadership managing managers.

• Desirable experience leading payments engineering and an understanding of processing, provider integrations, reconciliation, settlement, and controls.

• Proven success leading infrastructure or platform teams at scale, with strong knowledge of cloud systems, preferably AWS.

• Experience with business systems, integrations, and cross-functional delivery.

• Practical experience introducing AI tools or automation into business workflows.

• Sound judgement on security, investment, and technology partnerships.

• The ability to develop senior leaders and create an environment of high trust.

• Skilled in influencing decisions, and turn business priorities into deliverable plans.

Benefits

🏡 We're a remote-first company with a team spread across Ireland, the UK, the DACH region, North America and Australia. We believe great work comes from trust, so you'll have the flexibility to shape your working day around what works for you, your life and your team.

🌳 We grow our own timber! We provide dedicated Learning Days every year, a mentoring program, career coaching, development programs, and access to tools that help you build skills and shape your career.

🧘 Your wellbeing is important to us - we provide private healthcare, 2 Wellness Days, an employee assistance program.

🍼 We care for your family and provide Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Benefits.

🦸‍♀️ We support the women who work in Phorest by offering 2 weeks' leave for fertility treatment, pregnancy loss, and menopause.

🏠 Moving house? Phorest employees get 3 moving days.

💰 As part of our Financial Wellbeing, we provide competitive compensation, an Employee Share Purchase Scheme, Pension, Life Assurance, and Income Protection.

🚵🏿 We help you travel by providing a bike-to-work scheme as well as tax-saver transport tickets.

Phorest is an equal opportunity employer. For this Ireland-based position, hybrid and remote working are available. Get in touch to ask for more information or to chat about your future with Phorest!

Research shows that while men apply to jobs when they meet an average of 60% of the criteria, women and other marginalised folks tend to only apply when they check every box. So if you think you have what it takes, but don't necessarily meet every single point on the job description, please still get in touch. We'd love to have a chat and see if you could be a great fit.