Senior Engineering Manager

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.

What You'll Do:

• Lead, grow, and develop a high-performing team of 4–6 senior backend and platform engineers, owning hiring, coaching, performance management, and career development.

• Own the architecture and technical direction of Rain's core services, driving decisions across service boundaries, data modeling, build-vs.-buy, scalability, and technical debt.

• Remain hands-on in the code approximately 30% of the time through meaningful PR reviews, technical prototyping, debugging, and well-scoped implementation work.

• Establish and continuously raise engineering standards across testing, code quality, observability, incident response, on-call practices, and operational excellence.

• Drive the reliability, correctness, and auditability of systems that move money globally, including ownership of SLOs, error budgets, system resilience, and platform maturity.

• Translate ambiguous business and product goals into clear, sequenced technical plans while effectively communicating scope, tradeoffs, dependencies, and risk across Product, Compliance, Finance, and leadership.

• Partner with the Head of Engineering on organizational design, headcount planning, technical strategy, and engineering practices that scale across the broader organization.

You Are Likely To Succeed If You Have:

• 4+ years building production software, including 3+ years managing and developing engineers — ideally as an Engineering Manager or experienced Tech Lead who has owned team delivery, technical execution, and people development in high-stakes production environments

• Currently and demonstrably hands-on. You have written or reviewed meaningful production code within the last year and you want a role where that continues.

• 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.

• Strong hiring and coaching instincts, with managers or senior engineers you have developed who would work for you again.

• Clear written communication. You can make a complex technical tradeoff legible to a CEO, a compliance officer, and a partner's engineering team in the same week.

• Comfort with ambiguity and speed. You would rather ship something correct this quarter than design something perfect for next year.

Bonus Attributes:

• Hands-on experience with card issuing, processing, or the Visa and Mastercard network stack.

• Working knowledge of stablecoins, onchain settlement, custody and key management, or EVM and Solana infrastructure.

• Experience operating under SOC 2, PCI DSS, or bank and program-manager oversight.

• Experience leading distributed or multi-region teams.

Things That Enable A Fulfilling, Healthy And Happy Experience At Rain:

Unlimited Time Off Unlimited vacation can be daunting, so we require Rainmakers to take 10 days minimum for themselves.

Flexible Working We support a flexible workplace – work from home, come into an office, or both. We want everyone to work in an environment where they're their most confident and productive selves. New Rainmakers receive a stipend to set up a comfortable home workspace.

Easy To Access Benefits For US Rainmakers, we cover 95% of your health, dental, and vision plan costs and 90% for your dependents, plus a 100% company-subsidized life insurance plan.

Retirement Goals Plan for the future with confidence. We offer a 401(k) with a 4% company match.

Equity Plan Every Rainmaker gets an equity option plan so we all benefit from our success.

Health And Wellness High performance begins from within. Rainmakers receive a monthly stipend to be used for eligible health and wellness spending like gym memberships/fitness classes, massages, acupuncture - whatever recharges you!

In-Office Meals Rainmakers working from the office enjoy lunch and dinner on us, covered with a DoorDash credit.

Team Summits Summits play an important role at Rain. Time together helps us build relationships and a common destiny. Expect team and company offsites, both domestic and international.