Director of Engineering - Irvine, CA

Director of Engineering - Irvine, CA

Irvine, CA

$180,000

LendAPI is a leading fintech SaaS provider, delivering innovative lending solutions that empower financial institutions to streamline their processes, enhance customer experiences, and drive growth. Clients trust our cutting-edge platform to transform the way they offer financial services, and we are looking for a results-driven Director/VP of Engineering to lead our technical team and drive the development of scalable, high-performance fintech SaaS applications.

We are seeking a highly skilled, hands-on Director/VP of Engineering to lead our technical team and drive the development of scalable, high-performance fintech SaaS applications. The ideal candidate has extensive experience with Django, FastAPI, and modern Dev Ops practices, ensuring the reliability, security, and scalability of our platform. This role requires a strong leader who can collaborate with cross-functional teams, mentor engineers, and implement best practices in software development and infrastructure management.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead and manage the engineering team, fostering a culture of innovation and continuous improvement.
• Architect, design, and oversee the development of scalable web applications using Django or FastAPI.
• Ensure system reliability, performance, and security by implementing best Dev Ops practices.
• Drive the adoption of CI/CD, containerization, and cloud-native solutions.
• Collaborate with product management, design, clients and other stakeholders to align technical strategies with business objectives.
• Establish coding standards, best practices, and maintain a high-quality development process.
• Manage technical roadmaps, project timelines, and resource allocation.
• Mentor and grow a high-performing engineering team through hiring, training, and career development.
• Monitor system performance, optimize infrastructure, and troubleshoot complex technical challenges.
• Stay up to date with emerging technologies and industry trends to drive innovation.
• This is a hands on role. Lead by example, actively contributing to system architecture, developing proofs of concept to validate ideas, conducting peer code reviews, and supporting production systems.

Required Qualifications:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3+ years in a leadership role.
• Proven expertise in Django and FastAPI, with hands-on experience building and scaling web applications.
• Experience with front-end frameworks/libraries such as React, Angular.
• Strong background in Dev Ops, including AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Deep understanding of system architecture, microservices, and distributed systems.
• Experience working in high-scale environments handling millions of requests, with a proven track record of building applications that scale to 3000 requests per second.
• Strong knowledge of database design and optimization (PostgreSQL, Redis, or similar).
• Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to make data-driven decisions.
• Effective leadership and communication skills, with a track record of mentoring engineers.
• Bachelor or above in computer science or related field.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with event-driven architectures and message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ, or similar).
• Familiarity with monitoring and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, etc.).
• Previous experience in a fast-paced startup environment.
• Fintech industry experience preferred.

• Competitive salary, equity options and health insurance.
• A dynamic, collaborative, and innovative work culture.
• Opportunities to shape the technological direction of a fast-growing fintech startup.
• Flexible work environment with remote options.
• Work alongside a talented team in a collaborative and innovative environment.

If you're passionate about leading world-class engineering teams and building scalable, high-performance applications, we'd love to hear from you!