Director, Engineering

Director, Engineering

Job :

Location:

US-CA-Pleasanton

Category:
Engineering

Position Type:
Full Time

Today, through BHN’s single global platform, businesses of all kinds can tap into the world’s largest network of branded payment solutions. BHN helps businesses grow revenue, increase loyalty, motivate and reward their teams, disburse funds and engage consumers. Branded payment solutions include the issuance and distribution of gift cards, egifts, corporate payouts and rewards, along with the technology to deliver these products in seamless, integrated ways.

BHN’s network spans the globe with more than 400,000 consumer touchpoints. Learn more at

Hybrid flexibility: At Blackhawk Network, you’ll enjoy the best of both worlds—focused remote work plus in-person collaboration on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, our regular in-office days at our Pleasanton headquarters. This rhythm gives you the tools, connection, and autonomy you need to make a real impact.

In Financial Transactions group, we focus on high transaction volume combined with low latency to give the highest performing financial network that is possible. This role will focus on modernizing our core financial switch and routing capabilities; enabling network growth through modern API development; focus on detail for proprietary network controls, issuance capabilities, and the best-in-class fraud and risk systems.

Global reach requires a global role. This role will have teams and partnerships all over the world. We are the network that enables stored value transactions to occur everywhere customers want to interact with our brands. We enable stored value products and money-movement across all currencies and denominations. We bring state-of-the-art products to the hands of millions of customers.

Customer first, Technology second. We focus on always-on infrastructure, prioritizing customer access to their funds over everything, helping drive our zero-impact delivery goals.

• Lead and develop a team of engineers through a leadership team, setting clear expectations, fostering growth, and building a culture of accountability and collaboration.
• Partner closely with your peer Engineering Leaders, Lead Engineers, Product Management, and Technical Program Managers to align roadmaps and deliver cross-functional outcomes.
• Champion talent development — hiring, mentoring, performance management, and succession planning across your organization.
• Serve as a visible technical leader within BHN's broader Product & Technology organization, contributing to architecture forums, cross-team initiatives, and engineering culture.

Technical Strategy & Platform Ownership

• Help steer the technical direction for large-scale distributed backend systems
• Drive platform modernization — evolving from monolithic or legacy patterns toward API-first, cloud-native architectures on AWS.
• Establish and enforce engineering best practices: API design standards, code quality, CI/CD pipelines, observability, incident response, and post-mortem culture.
• Accountable for platform reliability, scalability, performance, and security across production systems that process high transaction volumes.

Security & Compliance Leadership

• Ensure all platform solutions meet PCI-DSS, enterprise security, and regulatory requirements including tokenization, sandboxed architectures, and access controls.
• Partner with Payments+, Fraud/Risk, and Info Sec teams to proactively identify and remediate security and compliance risks.

Operational Excellence

• Define and track meaningful engineering metrics — velocity, quality, uptime, and team health — and use data to drive continuous improvement.
• Build repeatable processes for onboarding, knowledge management, and operational runbooks that scale with team growth.

Manage competing priorities effectively in a fast-paced environment, balancing near‑term delivery with long‑term platform investment

Experience

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years in engineering leadership roles of increasing scope
• Proven experience managing managers — building and developing teams through other leaders
• Background in payments,…