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 - finnur@icelandair.is
Guðlaug Ólafsdóttir, People manager - gudlaugo@icelandir.is
In accordance with the equal rights policy of Icelandair, all applicants regardless of gender are encouraged to apply.