Senior Director, Engineering

Job Title:                              Senior Director, Engineering

Reports To:                         CTO

FLSA Status:                       Exempt

Department:                      Engineering

JOB SUMMARY:  Responsible for leading and managing the engineering organization, ensuring the delivery of secure, scalable, and reliable technology solutions that support business objectives. This role provides strategic direction, oversees engineering execution and technical standards, develops engineering talent, and partners with cross-functional leaders to align technology initiatives with organizational goals.

ESSENTIAL JOB FUNCTIONS:

• Engineering Leadership and Strategy:
  • Define and own the engineering vision, technical strategy, and multi-year roadmap in partnership with executive leadership
  • Lead, mentor, and grow multiple engineering teams, including engineering managers and senior individual contributors
  • Build and scale a high-performing organization through hiring, and talent development
  • Establish engineering standards, best practices, and a culture of technical and operational excellence
• Execution and Delivery:
  • Drive predictable, high-quality delivery of software across teams, balancing speed, quality, and technical debt
  • Oversee architecture and technical decision-making to ensure scalable, resilient, and maintainable systems
  • Own platform reliability, performance, and availability across AWS and GCP environments
  • Establish metrics and operating cadences to measure team health, delivery velocity, and system performance
• Cross-Functional Partnership:
  • Partner closely with Product, Security, and business stakeholders to align engineering with company goals
  • Communicate technical strategy, trade-offs, and progress to executive leadership
  • Represent engineering in company-wide planning, prioritization, and resourcing decisions
• Operational and Financial Stewardship:
  • Ensure systems meet the security, compliance, and regulatory requirements relevant to fintech (SOC 2, PCI-DSS, etc.)
  • Manage key vendor relationships and lead build-versus-buy decisions

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS: To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the minimum knowledge, skill, and/or ability required.

• 12 years of experience in software engineering, infrastructure, or platform roles
• 5 years in engineering leadership, including experience managing engineering managers and leading teams of 20 engineers
• Proven track record building, scaling, and retaining high-performing engineering organizations
• Demonstrated success setting technical strategy and delivering complex software at scale
• Strong technical foundation across cloud infrastructure (AWS and GCP), distributed systems, and modern software architecture
• Working knowledge of Kubernetes, containerization, infrastructure as code, and event-driven/streaming architectures (e.g., Kafka)
• Experience owning reliability, security, and operational excellence for production systems
• Strong understanding of security and compliance best practices in cloud-native environments

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Knowledge of FinOps practices, frameworks, and cloud cost-governance tooling
• Knowledge of observability tools (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus)
• Fintech Domain Experience:
  • Familiarity with loan origination systems (LOS)
  • Experience working with loan servicing platforms (e.g., LoanPro)
  • Understanding of end-to-end lending workflows including application intake, underwriting, decisioning, funding, and post-close processes
  • Knowledge of consumer lending products such as personal loans, auto loans, mortgages, or lines of credit
  • Awareness of regulatory and compliance requirements in lending (e.g., TILA, ECOA, FCRA, FDCPA, GLBA, UDAAP)
  • Experience integrating with credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian, TransUnion) or third-party data providers for identity verification and risk decisioning

COMPETENCIES:

• Customer Service: Exceptional attitude and a passion for providing outstanding service to internal customers.
• Strategic Leadership: Develops and communicates a clear technology vision that aligns engineering initiatives with organizational goals and long-term business objectives.
• People Leadership & Talent Development: Builds, develops, and retains high-performing teams through effective coaching, mentoring, succession planning, and performance management.
• Execution & Results Orientation: Drives accountability and delivers high-quality outcomes by effectively balancing business priorities, resource constraints, technical debt, and operational demands.
• Technical & Architectural Judgment: Applies deep technical expertise to guide architectural decisions, evaluate technology investments, and ensure scalable, secure, and reliable solutions.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Builds strong partnerships across departments, fostering alignment and effective communication to achieve shared business objectives.
• Operational Excellence: Establishes processes, standards, metrics, and governance practices that improve efficiency, reliability, security, compliance, and overall engineering performance.
• Business Acumen: Understands the financial, operational, and regulatory aspects of the business and incorporates those considerations into technology strategy and decision-making.

SUPERVISORY RESPONSIBILITY
This position is responsible for the leadership and supervision of multiple engineering teams, including engineering managers and their direct reports.

PHYSICAL DEMANDS

While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to stand, walk, reach and sit for a minimum of 8 hours with or without reasonable accommodation. The employee is required to use hands to finger, handle, or feel objects and/or tools. The employee is required to talk or hear with or without reasonable accommodation and must sometimes lift and move up to 10 pounds.

WORK ENVIRONMENT
While performing the logistics duties of this job, the employee is frequently exposed to moderate noises such as computers, printers, and other light traffic noise in an office setting.

This role is in-office.  Remote work may be performed from a pre-approved location, as arranged, and scheduled by team management and approved by department leadership.

OTHER DUTIES

Please note this job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Duties, responsibilities and activities may change or be supplemented at any time with or without notice