Tech Lead – Payments

Payments are becoming a strategic capability at Icelandair — directly shaping customer experience, conversion, profitability, operational reliability, and financial control.

The Payments team owns product and technology for payment methods, checkout, authorisation performance, closed-loop tenders (Saga Points, gift certificates, vouchers, travel credits), and payment servicing across direct, indirect, and offline channels.

This is a technical leadership role that bridges business and IT, in a domain where reliability, security, and compliance decisions affect revenue, customer trust, and financial control as directly as any system at Icelandair.

You will move fluidly between hands-on delivery and high-level architecture, planning, and analysis, working in a small, high-impact team and acting as the main technical counterpart to the Payment Product Manager and the Head of Loyalty & Payments.

What you’ll do:

• Own the technical architecture and full solution lifecycle for payments — gateways, PSPs, orchestration, wallets, tokenisation, authentication, and routing — in collaboration with Enterprise Architecture and the Experience, Decision, and Enterprise Engineering chapters.
• Lead the handover of payment-related systems and ownership from other teams into the Payments team.
• Translate product and business requirements into technical delivery plans, sequencing dependencies and risk across booking, servicing, loyalty, packages, and distribution.
• Ensure reliability, security, and compliance — monitoring, incident response, PCI, access control, and fraud-rule governance.
• Drive build-versus-buy decisions and manage integration with PSPs, acquirers, and fraud vendors.
• Champion AI-assisted development and set the standard as the team grows.
• Set and uphold engineering standards — code quality, testing, CI/CD, and documentation.

What you bring:

Experience

• 5+ years of professional software development, including systems integration or solution architecture
• Proven technical ownership or leadership — architecture, service ownership, leading technical delivery or system handovers, or mentoring engineers
• Hands-on experience with payment providers, gateways, or processing is a strong plus; experience in fintech, e-commerce, travel, or other high-volume transactional domains is valued

Technical skills

• Strong backend and integration development experience in a modern language, with a solid understanding of APIs and distributed systems
• Experience with payment gateways, PSPs, wallets, tokenisation, or authentication protocols is a strong plus
• Practical understanding of monitoring, incident management, and security practices (e.g. PCI DSS) for production systems

Ways of working

• Comfortable operating with high autonomy in a small, still-forming team
• Practical experience with CI/CD, DevOps practices, and producing clear technical documentation
• Comfortable working with external vendors and payment partners on integrations

Leadership & communication

• Ability to mentor and influence engineers through technical credibility rather than formal authority
• Able to explain complex technical topics to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, including Finance, Risk, and Commercial partners

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience); a master’s degree or relevant certifications are a plus

What we offer:

• A rare ground-floor opportunity to own a business-critical payments platform — shaping the architecture, the engineering practices, and the team that grows around them from day one
• Flexible working arrangements

Please submit your application along with a CV and cover letter no later than 16th. of August.

For further information, please contact:

Finnur Kolbeinsson, manager, Enterprise Engineering - [email protected]

Guðlaug Ólafsdóttir, People manager - [email protected]

In accordance with the equal rights policy of Icelandair, all applicants regardless of gender are encouraged to apply.