Engineering Manager, Payments

Qualia; United States; Remote; USD 170,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Qualia, the leading B2B real estate technology platform, is seeking an entrepreneurial Engineering Manager to lead the Payments team. This builder/player/coach role will redefine how a modern Payments team operates as AI handles the first pass on traditional tasks.

You’ll oversee high-liability systems for ACH and wire transfers, ensuring secure, accurate, and timely money movement across real estate transactions while collaborating with compliance and security teams.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a strong full-stack web developer
• 2+ years of experience managing a payments engineering team
• Direct experience building or maintaining money-movement systems is strongly preferred
• Strong understanding of transactional integrity, idempotency, and failure-mode design
• Familiarity with payment rails, banking APIs, or financial compliance standards is a plus

Responsibilities

• Serve as a hands-on Engineering Manager (Player/Coach) to build the payments team
• Design, build, and maintain systems that process ACH and wire transfers at scale (billions of dollars annually)
• Build and harden payment-processing pipelines that integrate with banking partners, payment rails, and third-party APIs
• Implement controls for wire fraud prevention, transaction verification, and anomaly detection
• Improve and extend core web applications (frontend and backend) that support escrow accounting and closing-day money movement
• Own architectural decisions for payments infrastructure, including data integrity, idempotency, retry/failure handling, and audit logging
• Partner with Compliance, Risk, and Accounting to meet regulatory and audit requirements (NACHA, SOC 2)

Skills

Full-stack development

Payments team leadership

Fintech experience

Architectural decisions

Mentoring

Job description

At Qualia, we’ve built the leading B2B real estate technology that transforms the home buying and selling experience into a simple, secure, and enjoyable process. Our SMB and Enterprise products bring together users from across the real estate ecosystem—homebuyers and sellers, lenders, title and escrow agents, and real estate agents—onto a single shared digital closing platform, providing greater clarity and transparency to real estate transactions. Today, through our business customers across the country, millions of consumers use Qualia to close on homes every year.

WHAT YOU’LL WORK ON

We are hiring an entrepreneurial hands-on Engineering Manager to lead Qualia’s Payments team. This is a builder/player/coach role, and you won’t just run a team - you’ll redesign how a modern Engineering Payments team operates when AI can do the first pass on nearly everything we used to do by hand. As an Engineering Manager, Payments, you’ve been in the fintech industry for a while and have a proven track record of success. You are comfortable leading complex, high-liability projects. You have experience making key architectural decisions and performing the research to back up those decisions. You’ve dealt with the consequences of your mistakes, and you know how to fight fires if necessary. You enjoy mentoring and providing support. You’ve thrived in different environments and realize that each team is unique.

Every real estate closing ends with money changing hands: earnest money deposits, loan funding, mortgage payoffs, seller proceeds, and commissions. Qualia powers a substantial portion of U.S. residential home sales every year, totaling billions of dollars in transaction volume. The Payments team builds the systems that move those funds safely, accurately, and on time.

Our engineers are entrepreneurial, pragmatic builders who move quickly without cutting corners, and who are as comfortable owning a project end to end as they are collaborating with a team. We ship frequently, as often as multiple times a day, and work directly with design, compliance, and customer-facing teams to build payment experiences our customers depend on.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Serve as a hands-on Engineering Manager (Player/Coach) to build the payments team
• Design, build, and maintain systems that process ACH and wire transfers at scale (billions of dollars annually), including origination, settlement, reconciliation, and exception handling
• Build and harden payment-processing pipelines that integrate with banking partners, payment rails, and third-party financial APIs
• Implement controls for wire fraud prevention, transaction verification, and anomaly detection alongside our security and compliance teams
• Improve and extend core web applications (frontend and backend) that support escrow accounting and closing-day money movement
• Own architectural decisions for payments infrastructure, including data integrity, idempotency, retry/failure handling, and audit logging
• Partner with Compliance, Risk, and Accounting stakeholders to ensure systems meet regulatory and audit requirements (e.g., NACHA rules, wire fraud regulations, SOC 2 controls)

YOUR BACKGROUND THAT LIKELY MAKES YOU A MATCH

• You’ve taken full ownership of complex, high-liability payment systems in production, and you know how to respond calmly and methodically when funds are on the line
• 5+ years of experience as a strong full-stack web developer and 2+ years of experience managing a payments engineering team
• Direct experience building or maintaining other money-movement systems (banking, fintech, payments processors, or similar regulated environments strongly preferred)
• Strong understanding of transactional integrity, idempotency, and failure-mode design in financial systems
• Familiarity with payment rails, banking APIs, or financial compliance standards (NACHA, OFAC screening, PCI, SOC 2) is a strong plus
• You have made key architectural decisions for large, high-stakes projects
• You have mentored junior developers
• You have worked on multiple engineering teams, both small and large