Engineering Manager
Player-coach Engineering Manager leading a backend team building payment processing, fraud detection, and compliance systems. Requires 7+ years engineering experience and 2+ years leading teams while remaining hands-on with Python, distributed systems, and GCP.
About the job
What You'll Do
- Contribute to the codebase as a technical force multiplier: filling gaps, improving quality, and modeling engineering standards.
- Lead and Develop Your Team: Manage a team of backend engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, ownership, and continuous growth. Conduct regular 1:1s, provide mentorship, and support career development across all levels of the team.
- Architect Critical Financial Systems: Design and implement payment processing, fraud detection, and compliance systems that handle millions of dollars daily with strict regulatory requirements — and guide your team in doing the same.
- Drive Technical Decisions: Own architecture decisions that impact the entire platform, establishing best practices and engineering standards as the organization scales.
- Stay Hands-On: Contribute directly to complex engineering work — write code, participate in design reviews, and remain an active technical voice on the team.
- Lead Cross-Domain Solutions: Coordinate complex interactions between payments, fraud detection, user management, and compliance systems across a distributed microservices architecture.
- Partner Across the Organization: Collaborate closely with product, compliance, and other engineering teams to design systems that meet both business and regulatory requirements.
- Build Engineering Culture: Establish coding standards, design patterns, and engineering practices that will define the team's culture from the ground up.
- Manage Delivery: Balance technical quality with business velocity — plan engineering work, remove blockers, and ensure the team ships reliably.
What We're Looking For
Required Experience
- 7+ years of software engineering experience building complex, production systems
- 2+ years of experience leading an engineering team, including performance management and hiring
- Demonstrated experience as a player-coach — comfortable moving between technical execution and team leadership
- Proven track record of solving complex, cross-domain engineering challenges in production environments
Education
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field required
- Master's degree in Computer Science or Engineering from an accredited university highly preferred
Technical Skills
- Backend Development: Python (we use Python 3), strong understanding of web frameworks and APIs
- Database Design: Experience with both NoSQL and SQL databases
- Cloud Infrastructure: Google Cloud Platform or similar cloud platforms
- Architecture Patterns: Domain-driven design, clean architecture, CQRS
- System Design: Ability to design systems that balance performance, maintainability, and business requirements
- Distributed Systems: Event-driven architectures, microservices, and high-scale system design
Leadership Skills
- Strong communicator who can translate complex technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders
- Experience setting technical direction and building alignment across engineering and product teams
- Ability to hire, onboard, and grow engineering talent
- Comfortable navigating ambiguity and making decisions with incomplete information
Preferred Experience
- Financial Systems: Payment processing, fraud detection, or compliance systems
- Financial Regulations: Understanding of AML, KYC, PCI DSS, or similar regulatory frameworks
- Banking Integrations: Experience with financial APIs and money movement systems
- High-Scale Systems: Experience with systems processing high transaction volumes
- Third-Party Integrations: Experience coordinating multiple external service integrations
Skills
Python, SQL, NoSQL, GCP, Domain-Driven Design, Cqrs, Microservices, Event-Driven Architecture, System Design, Payment Processing
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