Sr. engineering manager - payments

Our healthcare system is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the U.S. Every year, over 50 million Americans suffer adverse financial consequences as a result of seeking care, from lower credit scores to garnished wages. The challenge is only getting worse, as high deductible health plans are the fastest growing plan design in the U.S.

Cedar’s mission is to leverage data science, smart product design and personalization to make healthcare more affordable and accessible. Today, healthcare providers still engage with its consumers in a “one-size-fits-all” approach; and Cedar is excited to leverage consumer best practices to deliver a superior experience.

Cedar is expanding its product offerings and at the center of all that we do is payments. We are evolving our payment capabilities and payment platform to support our new offerings at scale. We need a Sr. Engineering Manager to help make this platform evolution successful. This role will lead two Payments teams through a combination of individual contributors and engineering managers.

Our payments platform is currently tightly coupled to business logic in ways that make it difficult to scale across multiple product lines. We have opportunities to improve observability for our systems to understand system health, diagnose issues quickly, and improve the payment experience. You will lead the solving of both categories of challenges.

The Payments Pillar’s scope extends beyond the payments platform. You will help enable Cedar’s payment capabilities in agentic workflows, improve performance across the Payments funnel, own the engineering partnership with third-party payment vendor integrations, and partner with Product and Commercial to evaluate and prioritize client payment feature requests.

You will work closely with staff and principal engineers to shape technical direction, evaluate tradeoffs, challenge assumptions, and bring an independent point of view. You do not need to be the primary architect or write code every day, but you should be comfortable engaging deeply in design reviews and technical decisions, deeply understanding your services, and taking accountability for outcomes.

In this position you will

• Partner with staff and principal engineers to lead the Payments Pillar through the evolution of Cedar’s Payments architecture, including decoupling payment capabilities from business logic so they can scale across multiple product lines and workflows.
• Lead, coach and develop Engineering Managers and individual contributors across the Payments Pillar, and support a high-performing and inclusive engineering culture.
• Establish and improve the metrics and instrumentation used to understand performance across payment features and workflows.
• Partner with Product and Commercial to balance new payment capabilities and performance improvements with foundational architecture and operational investments.
• Own the engineering relationship and technical outcomes for third-party payment vendor integrations.
• Identify opportunities to and lead initiatives that enable multiple teams to deliver results more effectively.

What we look for in an ideal candidate

Must-have qualifications

• 8+ years of professional experience.
• 3+ years of engineering management experience.
• Experience managing managers.
• Experience owning third-party vendor integrations.
• Experience owning business-critical production systems and their performance, reliability, and operational health.
• Strong cross-functional partnership skills, especially with Product and Commercial stakeholders.
• The ability to make sound judgments and advocate for the right balance between moving quickly, experimenting, and investing in foundational quality.
• Clear, proactive communication and a track record of navigating ambiguity, tradeoffs, and competing priorities.
• A commitment to holding a high bar for team execution and supporting the growth of engineers and engineering managers.
• Excitement about Cedar’s mission and a passion for improving the healthcare financial experience.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience in payments, fintech, or a closely related domain.
• Experience modernizing or decoupling complex production systems.
• Experience supporting agentic or AI-enabled workflows at scale.
• Experience driving the adoption of agentic development practices and AI-assisted tooling to accelerate team velocity.

Compensation Range and Benefits

Salary Range*: $221,000-$260,000. This role is also equity eligible. This role offers a competitive benefits and wellness package. *Subject to location, experience, and education.

#LI-REMOTE #LI-DS

What do we offer to the ideal candidate?

A chance to improve the U.S. healthcare system at a high-growth company! Our leading healthcare financial platform is scaling rapidly, helping millions of patients per year.

Unless stated otherwise, most roles have flexibility to work from home or in the office, depending on what works best for you.

For exempt employees: Unlimited PTO for vacation, sick and mental health days–we encourage everyone to take at least 20 days of vacation per year to ensure dedicated time to spend with loved ones, explore, rest and recharge.

16 weeks paid parental leave with health benefits for all parents, plus flexible re-entry schedules for returning to work.

Diversity initiatives that encourage Cedarians to bring their whole selves to work, including three employee resource groups: be@cedar (for BIPOC-identifying Cedarians and their allies), Pridecones (for LGBTQIA+ Cedarians and their allies) and Cedar Women+ (for female-identifying Cedarians).

Competitive pay, equity (for qualifying roles), and health benefits, including fertility & adoption assistance, that start on the first of the month following your start date (or on your start date if your start date coincides with the first of the month).

Cedar matches 100% of your 401(k) contributions, up to 3% of your annual compensation.

Access to hands-on mentorship, employee and management coaching, and a team discretionary budget for learning and development resources to help you grow both professionally and personally.

About us

Cedar was co-founded by Florian Otto and Arel Lidow in 2016 after a negative medical billing experience inspired them to help improve our healthcare system. With a commitment to solving billing and patient experience issues, Cedar has become a leading healthcare technology company fueled by remarkable growth. "Over the past several years, we've raised more than $350 million in funding & have the active support of Thrive and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). As of November 2024, Cedar is engaging with 26 million patients annually and is on target to process $3.5 billion in patient payments annually. Cedar partners with more than 55 leading healthcare providers and payers including Highmark Inc., Allegheny Health Network, Novant Health, Allina Health and Providence.