Lead System Engineer
Paynovate
Why Paynovate?
Paynovate is a Belgium based fintech with more than 80 talented employees. We’re building a company where dreams are shaped, where bold initiatives are taken, where your leadership, ownership and ability to follow-through are valued. As a growing e-money institution, we are bringing payment solutions to the next level – and you could be a part of that.
Context
We’re in the middle of a major infrastructure evolution — moving from a traditional, bare-metal environment to a modern, scalable AWS setup. The foundations are there, the migration has begun, and now we’re looking for a technical leader who can take it further.
This role blends hands-on engineering with technical leadership: guiding a team, shaping architecture, and rolling up your sleeves to solve complex problems. You’ll be at the heart of one of our most strategic projects, helping us deliver reliable, secure, and future-ready systems in a high-stakes, regulated environment.
What you’ll do
- Lead the AWS migration: take our mix of on-prem/data center systems and design, plan, and execute the move to AWS.
- Maintain legacy systems until their migration to the cloud.
- Be hands-on: architect, build, fix, and troubleshoot alongside the team.
- Modernize the stack: Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible), Docker, AWS services, MySQL.
- Own compliance: ensure infrastructure meets PCI-DSS and National Bank of Belgium standards.
- Manage databases: backup, recovery, security, performance tuning, and optimization.
- Coach and grow: mentor junior engineers (including a talented but less experienced teammate) and help hire the next one.
- Collaborate cross-team: work with developers to design applications with scalability, reliability, and security in mind, and communicate tech clearly to non-technical stakeholders.
- Troubleshoot software development infrastructure issues, including build, deployment, and test failures.
- Coordinate: help prioritize and follow up on infra-related projects, oversee third-party solutions and service providers.
- Be on-call: shared 24/7 support, about 1–2 times per month.
- Document: maintain clear and structured technical records.
What you bring
- Minimum 10 years experience in systems engineering.
- Strong AWS experience (at scale).
- Expertise in Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Ansible/Incebel.
- Strong Linux and Docker skills.
- Proficient in Bash scripting.
- Excellent understanding of networking
- Balanced knowledge of on-premise and cloud infrastructure.
- MySQL database administration (performance, backup/restore).
- Basic knowledge of HSMs.
- Experience operating 24/7 highly available production systems.
- Leadership skills
- Able to coach, delegate, and make decisions.
- Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.
- Excellent communication skills with technical and non-technical audiences.
- Mindset: proactive, organized, communicative, team player, and comfortable stretching beyond your comfort zone.