Engineering Manager (Financial Services)

Reown; New York (NY); Remote; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Salary + equity + tokens

Fully remote

Team offsites

Conference travel

Generous PTO

Learning & development

Job summary

WalletConnect is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead the Financial Services engineering squad, reporting to the CTO. You’ll shape the roadmap with Product, ensure reliability, and grow a distributed team.

This role is not hands‑on coding but requires technical depth to review designs, mentor engineers, and protect the team’s focus while delivering high‑impact services in DeFi access, treasury management, and security.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering with 2+ years of people management.
• Experience leading distributed teams and driving reliability.
• Track record of growing and retaining high‑performing teams.

Responsibilities

• Run the squad's operating rhythm with Product to keep delivery structured.
• Set team OKRs and translate company goals into squad plans.
• Remove blockers to ensure steady delivery progress.
• Hold regular 1:1s and coach across levels with constructive feedback.
• Conduct fair performance reviews and address underperformance with kindness.
• Be a strong technical voice reviewing designs and architectures.
• Own reliability: SLOs, error budgets, on-call, and postmortems.
• Balance roadmap, tech debt, and keep‑the‑lights‑on work with clear rationale.
• Align with Product, Design, other squads, and leadership to protect focus.
• Partner with People on hiring and onboarding to raise the bar.
• Read room signals, use data where available, and act early on risks.

Skills

Engineering leadership

Distributed systems

Delivery ownership

Remote-first leadership

Technical review

People management

Strategic planning

Communication

Hiring & coaching

Tools

Rust

TypeScript

AWS

Grafana

IaC

Job description

This Engineering Manager will report to our CTO to help WalletConnect build and scale the Financial Services engineering team: the team behind the value-added services packaged on top of the WalletConnect Network, spanning DeFi access, treasury management, and security & compliance.

You'll lead a cross-functional squad of engineers building systems where accuracy and reliability are paramount. You'll be accountable for the squad's delivery and technical outcomes: shaping the roadmap with your Product partner, keeping a high bar for quality and velocity, and holding the team to WalletConnect's engineering standards. We believe great engineering managers were strong engineers first, and never stopped thinking like one. This is not primarily a hands‑on coding role, but you'll have the technical depth to input on, understand, and challenge engineering decisions, and to get hands‑on (in code, reviews, or design docs) when it helps, without becoming the team's bottleneck. Above all, you'll be the person who makes the team better: hiring well, coaching honestly, mediating clearly, protecting focus, and caring about the humans doing the work.

Must Haves:

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with 2+ years managing engineers; you were a strong engineer first, and you're technically credible with senior ICs.
• Technical depth in building and operating distributed systems at scale; hands‑on when needed, whether that's reviewing code, architecture, or technical documents.
• A track record of building, growing, and retaining high‑performing teams, and of genuinely caring about the people on them.
• Experience leading remote‑first, distributed teams.
• Experience owning delivery of business‑critical services where accuracy and reliability are paramount: trading, treasury, exchange, or financial infrastructure strongly preferred.
• Structured and disciplined planning: you turn ambiguous goals into a predictable delivery cadence and hit the commitments you make.
• Pragmatic decision‑making: you right‑size solutions, balance speed and rigor deliberately, and avoid over‑engineering.
• Honest, charismatic communication and natural mediation: you give and receive direct feedback with kindness, simplify complex topics for non‑engineers, and turn disagreement into alignment.
• Self‑aware, context‑aware, and coachable, with strong instincts; a self‑starter who owns their work and is motivated by quality and innovation, not just output.

Nice‑to‑Haves:

• Financial infrastructure domain depth: CEX integrations, custody or treasury systems, onchain swaps and DeFi protocols, reconciliation, or transaction/address screening.
• Personal or professional experience with crypto/web3: you've used wallets, interacted onchain, or built in the space.
• Experience with our kind of stack: Rust and TypeScript services on AWS, Grafana-based observability, infrastructure-as-code.
• Experience introducing squad‑level operating standards (SLOs, error budgets, DORA‑style delivery metrics) across teams.

Responsibilities

• Run the squad's operating rhythm (planning, stand ups, and retros) in close partnership with your Product Manager, so delivery is structured, disciplined, and predictable.
• Set team OKRs with Product, and translate company goals and strategic priorities into what they mean for the squad.
• Hold the team accountable to its goals, and clear blockers out of its way.
• Hold regular 1:1s with every engineer; coach across seniority levels with honest, kind feedback, and build career paths people actually follow.
• Run fair performance reviews, and address underperformance early and directly, with kindness.
• Be a strong technical voice: review designs and architecture, challenge trade‑offs pragmatically, and foster a culture of high‑quality code.
• Own reliability outcomes for your squad's services: SLOs and error budgets, alert quality, a healthy on‑call rotation, and blameless incident reviews that are hard on problems, not on people.
• Make pragmatic trade‑off calls between roadmap, tech debt, and keep‑the‑lights‑on work, and explain the "why" clearly to engineers and non‑engineers alike.
• Align and mediate across Product, Design, other squads, and leadership, protecting the team's focus and surfacing risks and problems early.
• Partner with the People team on hiring: define what great looks like, run calibrated interviews, and close candidates who raise the bar; own their onboarding and time‑to‑productivity.
• Read the room and act early (on team health, delivery risk, or design drift), using data where it exists and sound judgment where it doesn't.

• Competitive compensation package including salary, equity, and potentially tokens.
• Fully remote position with a budget for your home office or work environment.
• Regular team offsites to incredible locations around the world.
• Opportunities to travel to conferences and community events.
• Generous PTO and parental leave.
• Meaningful Learning & Development budget.
• The chance to build at the forefront of on‑chain payments with one of the most recognised companies in Web3.