VP of Engineering

Head Of Engineering

We are hiring a Head of Engineering to own the craft, quality, and technical direction of a roughly 50-person engineering organization. This is deliberately not a role about growing headcount to 150. It is a role about making a small, senior team produce output that looks like a much larger one — by raising the engineering bar, tightening the systems that move real money, and being genuinely in the code and the architecture rather than adjacent to it.

You will lead through a mix of direct reports and a small group of engineering managers and tech leads, partnering closely with Product, Risk, and Compliance. You will spend your time on design reviews, incident retros, hiring, and the handful of technical bets that determine whether we can support the next order of magnitude of transaction volume.

If your ideal week is entirely calendar blocks and roadmap decks, this is not the right role. If your ideal week includes a hard design debate, a code review that changes someone's mind, and a coaching conversation that raises a manager's ceiling, keep reading.

The responsibilities include:

• Own engineering strategy and architecture across card issuing, wallets, ledger, money movement, onchain settlement, and integrations with card networks and banking partners — including the multi-year technical roadmap that gets us there.
• Set and own Rain's engineering quality bar across system design, code review, testing, observability, documentation, and technical decision-making, ensuring correctness is treated as critical for systems that move customer funds.
• Go deep where the risk is. You won't own day-to-day code, but you will review critical designs, weigh in on the highest-consequence architecture and build-vs.
  
  -buy decisions, and be technical enough that no one can hand you a bad design and have it pass.
• Drive reliability, scalability, and operational excellence by establishing SLOs, improving incident response, capacity planning for 10x growth, and designing resilient systems with graceful degradation, idempotency, and replay capabilities.
• Build security, compliance, and correctness into the platform by design, partnering closely with Risk, Compliance, and Security to meet PCI, SOC 2, fraud-control, regulatory, and blockchain infrastructure requirements.
• Increase engineering velocity without sacrificing quality through improvements to CI/CD, developer tooling, local environments, technical debt management, and architecture that enables teams to ship safely and independently.
• Build and develop a high-performing engineering organization by hiring and coaching engineering managers and technical leads, establishing clear team ownership and boundaries, and owning headcount planning and the performance bar.
• Operate as a member of the leadership team — translating company strategy into technical plans, partnering across Product, Design, Risk, Compliance, and GTM, and representing engineering to the board, banking and network partners, and customers.

You are likely to succeed if you have:

• 15+ years building production software, including 8+ years leading engineers and meaningful time leading managers.
• Current technical credibility. You have written or reviewed meaningful production code recently enough that an architecture review is a place you add value, not a place you nod along.
• Deep experience with distributed backend systems at scale: data modeling, consistency and idempotency, queues and event-driven design, and the operational reality of running all of it.
• A track record of raising an engineering bar. You can point to specific practices you introduced and the measurable change in quality, velocity, or reliability that followed.
• Real reliability ownership — you have carried a pager, run incident command during a serious outage, and built the follow-through that kept it from recurring.
• Experience in payments, fintech, banking infrastructure, or another domain where money, ledgers, or regulatory obligations made correctness non-negotiable.
• You have hired and developed engineering managers, not only engineers. There are leaders you grew who would come work for you again.
• Clear written communication. You can…