Director of Engineering

Step; United States; Remote; USD 250,000 - 400,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Job summary

Step is seeking a senior engineering leader to guide a growing, customer-facing fintech platform. You will shape architecture, drive development practices, and partner with executives to align technical direction with business goals.

You will mentor engineers, scale distributed systems, and maintain reliability and security as the product scales, balancing swift delivery with long‑term investments.

Qualifications

• Min 10 years of software engineering experience with leadership of teams.
• Proven track record developing engineering managers and senior engineers.
• Strong CS fundamentals and pragmatic judgment.
• Experience building scalable, customer-facing software.
• Excellent cross-functional communication and product sense.
• Hands-on, low-ego leadership with ownership mindset.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, recruit, and retain engineers and senior leaders.
• Define technical strategy and the engineering roadmap with cross-functional partners.
• Own execution across multiple teams to improve delivery quality and speed.
• Guide architecture decisions for scalability, reliability, security, and debt.
• Establish engineering standards and remove barriers to progress.
• Balance near-term delivery with long-term investment for dependable operation.

Skills

Leadership of engineers

People management

Software fundamentals

Distributed systems

Technical judgment

Communication

Job description

Role overview

Lead and expand an engineering organization responsible for reliable, customer-facing financial products used at significant scale. The role combines organizational leadership with technical judgment: setting direction, improving execution, shaping architecture and development practices, and keeping teams focused on customer and business outcomes. You will work closely with executive and cross-functional leaders while staying close enough to the technology to make informed decisions.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, recruit, and retain engineers, engineering managers, and senior technical leaders while building a high-performing, accountable culture.
• Partner with the CTO and leaders in Product, Design, Operations, Risk, and related functions to define technical strategy and the engineering roadmap.
• Own execution across multiple teams, improving delivery quality, speed, predictability, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
• Guide decisions involving architecture, distributed systems, scalability, reliability, security, software quality, infrastructure, and technical debt.
• Establish effective engineering standards and processes without unnecessary bureaucracy, and remove technical or organizational barriers to progress.
• Balance near‑term product delivery with long‑term investments needed for dependable and secure operation as the product and organization grow.

Requirements

• At least 10 years of software engineering experience, including substantial leadership of engineering teams or organizations.
• Demonstrated success managing and developing engineering managers and senior engineers.
• Strong computer science and software engineering fundamentals, with pragmatic technical judgment.
• Experience building and scaling reliable, customer-facing software and evolving distributed systems as products grow.
• Excellent communication across technical and non‑technical audiences, along with strong product sense.
• Hands‑on, low‑ego leadership style with a strong bias toward ownership, execution, quality, and reliability.

Nice to have

• Experience in fintech, banking, payments, lending, or another highly regulated environment.
• Experience with large‑scale consumer or mobile‑first products.
• Experience leading through rapid growth, organizational change, or major operational scaling.