Engineering Manager – Merchant Defenders

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead and empower our Merchant Defenders team at Vipps MobilePay, driving merchant authentication and authorization across our unified Nordic mobile wallet platform! Merchant Defenders owns how merchants, partners, and users prove who they are and what they can access. We build the secure, foundational capabilities that other teams rely on to develop fast and reliable services for over 12 million users and more than 500,000 businesses across the Nordics. In this role, you’ll join a mature, high-trust engineering team with deep technical and security expertise. Your mission is to develop its people and help the team focus its expertise where it makes the biggest difference. You’ll bring product and business judgement, challenge assumptions constructively, and work with colleagues across the organisation to turn complex platform needs into clear priorities and achievable commitments. There is room to contribute hands-on where it helps, while your main responsibility is people, direction, and delivery. What You'll Do 🚀

• Lead and develop people: Coach engineers, provide thoughtful feedback, set clear expectations, and build an open culture where people feel supported and take full ownership.
• Set priorities with the team: Connect platform work to merchant and company needs. Help the team balance security, reliability, user and developer experience, and business value—deciding when to invest in a lasting foundation and when a simpler approach is enough.
• Help work move forward: Break complex initiatives into manageable steps, remove blockers, and improve how the team delivers. Keep commitments realistic as operational responsibilities and emerging needs arise.
• Build relationships across the organisation: Understand what other teams need from the platform, negotiate priorities, manage expectations, coordinate dependencies, and help teams adopt the capabilities we build.
• Contribute to technical decisions: Work with engineers on architecture, security, reliability, and adoption. Ask informed questions and connect technical choices to their wider consequences.
• Plan for team growth: Identify future capacity and skill needs, lead hiring and onboarding, and nurture continuous knowledge-sharing.

What You Bring 💡 You may already be an Engineering Manager, or you may be ready for your first formal people-management role. You don’t need to arrive as an authentication specialist. We’re looking for:

• Someone who enjoys working closely with people: listening, understanding what motivates them, and helping them grow. You have supported colleagues through mentoring, feedback, onboarding, or leadership, and want to take responsibility for their development and wellbeing.
• Sound product and business judgement: you understand merchant needs, question priorities, and connect technical platform work to tangible business outcomes.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills to align expectations and build consensus across cross-functional teams.
• Technical understanding grounded in experience with software systems and engineering teams, and the curiosity to learn a complex domain.
• The confidence to challenge constructively, listen carefully, make pragmatic decisions, and follow through.
• An AI-first mindset: you actively use AI in your work, look for opportunities to improve how things are done, and help others develop effective practices. You bring curiosity, practical experience, and critical judgement about the results.

Don't meet 100% of the criteria? Apply anyway! We value unique perspectives, curiosity, and potential just as much as past experience. What We Offer ✨ We believe in high pace with low shoulders, where everyone is encouraged to experiment, learn, and grow together:

• Generous vacation schemes and dedicated time off to recharge.
• High-level health, life, and travel insurance coverage, alongside competitive pension plans.
• Vibrant social culture with active communities, joint workouts, Friday socials, and great canteen facilities.
• A culture that celebrates learning from mistakes (#noworries) and loves simplifying complexity.

Practical Details 🎯

• Application deadline: November 8th - we'll review applications on an ongoing basis
• Location: Oslo, Norway (Centrally located at Barcode / Oslo S, with hybrid flexibility).
• Language: English (working language).
• Questions? Feel free to reach out to the Hiring Manager, Mats Aubell.

Our Recruitment Process: Applying should be simple, and everyone deserves a fair assessment.

• Get started in just two minutes. All you need is your name and email address.
• Complete your profile. Follow the link in your mailbox and fill out your profile in Alva Labs, our recruitment platform. Once completed, your application is submitted. A quick heads-up: Alva refers to every step as a "test" or "assessment", including your profile. Just complete what's on your list. If we'd like you to take tests, we'll let you know.
• Assessments and interviews. During the process, you’ll meet with us for interviews and complete a personality assessment and a logical reasoning test (approx. 35 minutes in total). The order may vary depending on the role.
• Offer and references.

Why do we use psychometric testing? These tests help us evaluate candidates more fairly and accurately than a CV alone, giving everyone an equal starting point. We always consider your results alongside your experience. You’ll also have access to your own results and can reuse them for 24 months. About the company Hi, we’re Vipps! We make it very, very easy to tap in stores, send money to friends, shop online, join customer clubs, settle bills, send gifts, donate to charity, raise funds, pay invoices, and pay at flea markets. And so much more. Here you’ll find over 600 simplification enthusiasts across our offices in Oslo, Copenhagen, Aarhus and Helsinki. Together, we create the world’s easiest payment solutions for people, businesses and organisations. And we have fun while doing it! Some numbers we’re a bit proud of: Vipps is used by 12.5 million users across and 500 000 businesses across the Nordics – and more than 1.3 billion transactions flow through our systems every year. Something we’re even more proud of: We’re a really close team made up of many different people. That’s how we build services that are easy enough for the grandfather and advanced enough for the expert. So naturally, everyone is welcome to Vipps, regardless of their background and identity. So go ahead and apply for this job!