Director of Engineering

The role
You own Pipe’s engineering output. This is a hands-on leadership role. You are in the codebase, in the architecture decisions, and in the incident channel when something breaks. You find the technical gaps, build the systems that scale with the business, and match engineering speed to what the business needs.

You lead about 10 engineers and stay technical enough to pair with an engineer or debug a production issue yourself.

What you’ll do
Technical leadership and architecture
Own the health, scalability and reliability of Pipe’s systems end to end, from partner-facing APIs and SDKs to money movement, capital markets infrastructure and AI/ML model infrastructure for credit underwriting.
Make and defend architectural decisions. Stay close enough to the code to know when a proposed design will not hold.
Set standards for code quality, testing, deployment and incident response that the team follows.
Sequence the technical roadmap against speed, scale and risk, starting with credit operations, liquidity tooling and partner integrations.

Team leadership and execution
Lead about 10 engineers through two squad leads. Set the technical bar. Unblock people directly.
Create clarity and momentum, and hold a pace the team can sustain.
Build a culture where engineers make the call and defend it.
Recruit, mentor and develop engineers as the team grows.

Cross-functional execution
Work with Product on scope, sequence and delivery.
Work with Risk and Data Science so infrastructure supports credit decisioning at scale.
Work with Capital Markets and Finance on money movement, reconciliation and reporting.
Represent engineering in partner technical conversations, including API and SDK integrations with platform partners.

Operational rigor
Own incident response and production reliability. You are in the room when something breaks, not told afterwards.
Build monitoring, alerting and on-call practices that catch issues before partners see them.
Improve code review, deployment and testing to raise velocity and hold quality.

What we’re looking for
Required
6+ years in software engineering, including 2+ years leading a team of 5 or more engineers.
Experience at a fintech, a payments company, or another company running regulated financial systems.
Hands-on: you review code, debug production issues and make architectural calls yourself.
Track record of scaling engineering teams and systems at an early-stage or high-growth startup.
Experience owning business-critical infrastructure. Uptime, reliability and security are not optional at Pipe.
You work well with Product, Risk, Data Science, Capital Markets and Finance.
First-principles operator: you debug and fix production issues and technical debt yourself rather than delegating and forgetting them.
Comfortable working through imperfect systems and legacy tradeoffs.

Preferred
Payments, money movement or lending infrastructure.
Partner SDK and API integrations at scale, in embedded finance, marketplaces or platform partnerships.
Scaling an engineering team from Series A to Series C.
Credit risk or capital markets systems.