Team Lead - Hardware Partner Engineering

Seniority: Lead Manager
Location: San Francisco
Posted: 23d ago

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About this role

<h4>This is Adyen</h4> Adyen provides payments, data, and financial products in a single solution for customers like Meta, Uber, H&M, and Microsoft - making us the financial technology platform of choice. At Adyen, everything we do is engineered for ambition.  For our teams, we create an environment with opportunities for our people to succeed, backed by the culture and support to ensure they are enabled to truly own their careers. We are motivated individuals who tackle unique technical challenges at scale and solve them as a team. Together, we deliver innovative and ethical solutions that help businesses achieve their ambitions faster. <h2>Team Lead - Hardware Partner Engineering </h2> Adyen is seeking a Partner Engineering Manager to build and lead our Hardware Partner Engineering function. This is a hands-on player-coach role: you'll manage a small team of Partner Engineers while personally owning the technical relationship with one of our key terminal OEM partners. You will be Adyen's primary day-to-day technical interface with our hardware OEM partners, driving OEM accountability on open issues, representing our product strategy, and building the tooling and processes this function needs as it scales. As Adyen evolves its hardware offerings to incorporate more customer needs (e.g. loyalty) and interactive experiences, the need for a dedicated and technically astute team managing this partner surface will only grow. This role is foundational to that effort: you'll be one of the first people to staff and shape this function, establishing how Adyen manages OEM technical relationships for years to come. The ideal candidate combines direct engineering or systems experience (ideally in embedded/hardware or device-adjacent environments) with proven people leadership, and brings a proactive, high-agency mindset to building a team and function from an early stage. <h2>What you'll do:</h2> <ul> <li>Manage and coach a small team of Hardware Partner Engineers, each working with a specific OEM, while personally owning day-to-day technical coverage of one OEM relationship yourself.</li> <li>Act as Adyen's primary technical point of contact for assigned OEM partner(s): debugging, reproducing, documenting, and driving issues to resolution, escalating internally when necessary.</li> <li>Drive internal alignment across Product, Engineering, Hardware Integrity/Reliability, and Commercial teams on prioritization of OEM issues and requests, ensuring OEMs are focused on Adyen's highest-priority issues.</li> <li>Partner with the Hardware Integrity and other cross-functional teams to deploy tooling, automation, and process improvements with OEM partners to scale quality efforts beyond manual ticket-chasing.</li> <li>Partner with Commercial counterparts to drive proactive improvements to the Adyen payment experience on partner devices (e.g., performance, reliability), not just reactive bug-fixing.</li> <li>Build the operating model for this still-early function: define team structure, ways of working, and escalation paths as Adyen adds OEM relationships and device coverage under the hardware independence strategy.</li> <li>Establish and maintain senior-level relationships with OEM partners (e.g. Verifone, Castles), including regular business reviews and escalation management.</li> <li>Use Adyen's planning processes to secure resources and align senior stakeholders on team direction as scope grows.</li> </ul> <h2>Who you are:</h2> <ul> <li>8+ years of direct people management experience with a track record of coaching and developing technical, partner-facing Partner Engineers / Solutions Architects.</li> <li>5+ years of hands-on technical experience (software/systems engineering, embedded systems, or technical program management), ideally with exposure to hardware, embedded, or device-level environments.</li> <li>Comfortable diagnosing technical issues at the systems/device level and engaging credibly with OEM engineering counterparts — you don't need to be the one writing embedded firmware, but you need to understand it well enough to hold partners accountable.</li> <li>Proven experience driving operational improvement — turning a backlog of recurring issues into sustainable processes, tooling, or automation rather than one-off firefighting.</li> <li>Strong cross-functional communicator, comfortable driving alignment across Product, Engineering, Reliability, and Commercial teams, and navigating ambiguity in a function that is still being defined.</li> <li>Ability to build trusted relationships with external partner engineering teams, including counterparts based in Asia and EMEA.</li> <li>High agency: you identify opportunities, form a point of view, get alignment, and move — without waiting for the function to be fully built out around you.</li> <li>Based in or willing to work from Amsterdam; comfortable with some travel and with schedules that occasionally span partner teams in Asia and US time zones.</li> </ul> Total rewards & compensation The annual base salary range for this role is $198,000 - $293,000. Compensation is based on factors including qualifications, experience, and location. Total compensation package includes equity (RSUs), 401(k), health, dental, vision, and more. In-office expectations This role is based in our San Francisco office. We're an office-first company and expect employees to work in-office at least 3 days a week on average. This approach helps strike a balance betwee

Team Lead - Hardware Partner Engineering

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About this role

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