Staff Manager - Labs & Platform

This role is two jobs that make each other better, and we mean the split literally: roughly half your time on Labs, half on our backend.

MONEI Labs is where we try things before they are products. Right now that means around thirty live experiments: MCP servers that let merchants query their payments from inside Claude or Gemini, SEPA Request-to-Pay, zero-knowledge compliance, enterprise stablecoins under MiCA, voice payments, an AI agent that answers merchant support calls, and internal tools our own team runs on. Some ship. Some get killed. That is the point.

The other half is the real platform. You’ll build alongside our backend engineers on the AWS-native serverless stack that moves actual money - Lambda, DynamoDB, EventBridge, Step Functions, with AppSync GraphQL as the API layer. This is not “support the backend team when they need you”. It’s your codebase too.

That combination is the whole idea. The experiments stay honest because the person running them also maintains production. The platform gets better because the person maintaining it also sees what’s coming.

We’re looking for someone creative and proactive enough to be handed a vague idea and come back with something working, without waiting to be told how - and able to lead their own team of interns while doing it.

The “manager” half is real. You’ll lead a small team of 2-3 UPC interns: pick them, onboard them, review their code, and turn a first job into a proper engineering apprenticeship. For most of them this will be the first real codebase they’ve touched, and how good they become is largely down to you.

The “staff” half is just as real. You’ll still be writing code, making the architectural calls, and shipping yourself.

What you’ll do

• Turn ideas into working things, fast. Most Labs projects go from a conversation to something clickable in days, not quarters. You’ll own that pace, and the judgement about where a shortcut is fine and where it absolutely isn’t.
• Build and maintain production backend with the rest of the engineering team: services, APIs, data models, the edge cases that matter when a transaction fails mid-sale. Real money and real uptime.
• Decide what lives and what dies. A prototype that proves an idea wrong is a success. You’ll be honest about which ones those are, and say so early.
• Lead and grow a team of 2-3 UPC interns. Run the selection, onboard them, set the goals, review every pull request, and give the kind of feedback that makes someone a better engineer. Protect their learning time from the urgent.
• Break work down so juniors can win. Turn a rough idea into tasks that are genuinely shippable by someone three months into their first job, without lowering the bar on what reaches a real merchant.
• Build with AI properly. A good part of Labs is about what AI makes newly possible in payments, and a good part of how we build it is AI-assisted. You’ll be fluent in both senses.
• Set the bar for what graduates. Define what a Labs project needs - tests, docs, security review - before it can be handed over as something real.

• TypeScript, Node and AWS, in production. This is not negotiable and it is not something to pick up on the job.
• 4+ years shipping software in production, with at least one thing you owned end to end from the first line to real users.
• A generalist’s range. Projects land wherever the idea does: an API integration one month, an AI agent the next, an internal tool after that. You’re comfortable not being an expert on day one, and you get to useful fast.
• Proactive and creative with real autonomy. You’ll often be the one deciding what to build and how, from a one-line brief. That suits some people and makes others miserable.
• Real fluency with AI-first workflows. Not “I’ve tried Copilot” - you build with these tools daily and know where they help and where they lie to you.
• Experience mentoring or leading engineers, formally or informally: onboarding juniors, running code reviews, and raising the level of people around you.
• You still write code and want to. This is not a role where you stop shipping.
• Professional English and Spanish (C1+).

Bonus points

• Experience with payments, fintech or any regulated environment: card acceptance, PCI, tokenization, SEPA, open banking.
• Rapid-prototyping tools (Lovable, v0 and similar) used on real projects, not demos.
• Mobile development (Swift, Kotlin or React Native) - some experiments reach the phone.
• Previous experience working with university interns or in an academic partnership (UPC, UMA or similar).
• Contributions to open source, technical writing or community involvement.
• Quantified impact. If you can tell us the numbers behind what you built, tell us.

• Competitive salary.
• Hybrid work: two days a week from our Málaga or Barcelona office, three days remote.
• AI tools on us (Claude, Cursor, etc.).
• Real ownership: your decisions reach production, and merchants, within days.

Equal opportunity

At MONEI we value diversity and are committed to equal opportunity. We assess every candidate on their skills and fit for the role, with no discrimination of any kind.

MONEI is revolutionizing omnichannel payments for top brands across Southern Europe. Our award-winning serverless architecture even earned recognition as the AWS Startup Architecture of the Year (Iberia region). With rapid global expansion underway, we’re building the future of payment processing-and we want you on our team.