# Head of Engineering

**Company:** [Rain](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/rain)
**Location:** New York, NY
**Role:** Engineering Management
**Salary:** $300k – $400k/yr
**Experience:** 10+ years
**Skills:** Distributed Systems, Backend Systems, Data Modeling, Idempotency, Event-Driven Architecture, Queues, SLOs, Incident Response, CI/CD, Observability, Pci Dss, SOC 2, Stablecoins, Evm, Solana
**Posted:** 2026-08-31

> Leads the technical direction, engineering quality, reliability, and hands-on architecture of a 30-person organization building payment, ledger, wallet, and settlement infrastructure. Requires 10+ years of production software experience, 4+ years leading engineers, and deep distributed-systems and regulated-finance expertise.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Set and own the engineering quality bar across system design, code review, testing, observability, documentation, and technical decision-making.
- Provide hands-on technical leadership through code and design reviews, prototyping, production debugging, and architecture and build-versus-buy decisions.
- Own architecture and technical strategy for card issuing, wallets, ledgers, money movement, onchain settlement, and integrations with card networks and banking partners.
- Drive reliability, scalability, and operational excellence through SLOs, incident response, capacity planning, graceful degradation, idempotency, and replay capabilities.
- Partner with Risk, Compliance, and Security to build PCI, SOC 2, fraud-control, regulatory, and blockchain infrastructure requirements into the platform.
- Improve CI/CD, developer tooling, local environments, technical debt management, and architecture so teams can ship safely and independently.
- Coach engineering managers and technical leads, maintain high hiring and performance standards, establish clear team ownership, and collaborate across Product, Design, Risk, Compliance, and GTM.

## Requirements
- 10+ years building production software, including 4+ years leading engineers.
- Current, demonstrable hands-on experience writing or reviewing meaningful production code.
- Deep experience with distributed backend systems at scale, including data modeling, consistency, idempotency, queues, event-driven design, and operations.
- Track record of raising engineering quality and demonstrating measurable improvements in quality, velocity, or reliability.
- Experience owning reliability, carrying a pager, leading serious incident response, and preventing recurrence.
- Experience in payments, fintech, banking infrastructure, or another domain where correctness and regulatory obligations are critical.
- Strong hiring, coaching, written communication, ambiguity-management, and execution skills.

## Nice-to-haves
- Experience with card issuing, processing, or Visa and Mastercard network infrastructure.
- Working knowledge of stablecoins, onchain settlement, custody and key management, EVM, or Solana infrastructure.
- Experience operating under SOC 2, PCI DSS, or bank and program-manager oversight.
- Experience leading distributed or multi-region teams.

## Compensation and Benefits
- Annual salary: $300,000–$400,000.
- Equity option plan.
- Unlimited time off, with a minimum of 10 days required.
- Flexible workplace and home-office setup stipend.
- US health, dental, and vision coverage, subsidized life insurance, and 401(k) with a 4% company match.
- Monthly health and wellness stipend.
- In-office meals and domestic and international team summits.

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