Engineering Lead (United States)

How to Apply: To apply, please send your resume and a short 3–5 minute video explaining why you’re a great fit for this role to View email address on apply.placed-app.com

We're looking for a player-coach Engineering Lead — a 10–100x, AI-native senior/staff-level engineer who still ships every week, but who also sets architecture, raises the bar for everyone around them, and helps us build the financial platform where Bitcoin, dollars, and stablecoins finally live in one place.

If your best work happens in the codebase — orchestrating fleets of agents, reviewing architecture, unblocking teammates, and occasionally rewriting the thing everyone else was afraid to touch — keep reading.

What we're building

Onramp is building the money platform of the future for individuals, businesses, and financial institutions:

• Multi-Institution Custody (MIC) — the emerging standard for securing Bitcoin: no single point of failure, keys distributed across independent, regulated institutions. Battle-tested, and increasingly what the market is demanding as single-institution and self-custody models show their cracks.
• Onramp Finance — consumer brokerage and cash management: trading, DCA, yield, and soon cards and spending — Bitcoin and dollars, side by side.
• Money movement infrastructure — dollar and stablecoin rails, tokenized deposits, and banking partnerships that make moving value as programmable as moving data.
• API infrastructure-as-a-service — the same custody and brokerage infrastructure we run, exposed as APIs so exchanges, fintechs, and institutions can embed it into their own products — powering our international expansion and enterprise partnerships.

We work directly with banks, custodians, and financial institutions. The regulatory tailwinds are real, the institutional demand is real, and the platform re-architecture to serve it is happening right now. You'd arrive at the exact moment the foundation is being poured.

The role

This is not a pure management job. We're structuring engineering into small, autonomous pods — two engineers, product, design — with high ownership and clear accountability. Your job is to make those pods dangerous:

• Architect. Own platform architecture across our API re-platforming, custody infrastructure, money movement rails, and the mobile/web clients that sit on top. Design systems that a small team can operate and an institution can trust.
• Ship. You're an IC first. You'll write code most days — the hard parts: core services, API design, integrations with custodians, banks, and stablecoin rails.
• Document and de-risk. Turn tribal knowledge into written architecture, runbooks, and decision records. We move fast; you make it durable.
• Coach. Mentor a talented, hungry team. Step in when a project drifts. Raise the quality bar through review and example, not process for its own sake.
• Multiply with AI. Build and evangelize AI-native workflows — agent orchestration, multi-model code review, automated testing and documentation — that make one engineer perform like ten, and the team like a hundred.
• Partner across the business. Work directly with product, sales, and our banking/custody partners. Engineering here sits at the table where the business gets decided.

Who you are

• A senior/staff/principal-level engineer (or a hands-on VP/Head of Eng who misses the keyboard) with deep experience building production financial systems, APIs, or platform infrastructure.
• Insanely AI-native. You don't just use Copilot — you orchestrate agents, run multi-model workflows, and have strong, current opinions on tooling because you use it every day. You believe the what could I do with 100k engineers question is worth taking literally.
• An architect who ships: comfortable owning system design and the pull requests that implement it.
• A force multiplier: you've led through influence, mentorship, and code — and people got better because you were there.
• Fluent (or aggressively curious) in the money stack: Bitcoin, custody, stablecoins, payment rails, brokerage, ledgering.
• Clear written communicator — architecture docs, decision records, and async updates that people actually read.
• Comfortable with the ambiguity and pace of an early-stage company where the roadmap is won, not given.

Nice to have: experience with multi-party custody or key management, banking/fintech integrations (KYC, ledgering, ACH/wires, stablecoin issuance), React/React Native + modern backend stacks, mobile product experience, or prior early-stage leadership.

Why this role, why now

• Leverage. Small team, massive surface area. Your architectural decisions become the platform. No layers between you and impact.
• Timing. Bitcoin is institutionalizing, stablecoin legislation is live, and the industry's custody model is being rethought in real time. We're positioned exactly where those currents meet.
• The AI moment. We are rebuilding how software gets built. You'll have budget, mandate, and cultural support to push AI-native engineering as far as it can go.
• Ownership. Competitive salary, meaningful equity, and a seat at the table as we scale.

How we work

Remote-first (US), high-trust, low-ceremony. Small pods, direct communication, written culture, biweekly all-hands with live AI demos. We care about output, not hours. We're a mission-driven team that believes sound money and sound engineering go together.

The process

Fast and respectful of your time: intro call → technical/architecture conversation with the team → working session (bring your AI toolkit — we want to see how you actually build) → founder conversation → offer.

Sound like you? Email View email address on apply.placed-app.com with your GitHub/portfolio and a few sentences on the most leveraged thing you've built lately — human or agent headcount both count.