Head of Engineering & Architecture — Fintech Payments

Next Matter; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 230,000 - 350,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Unlimited time off

Flexible working

Health and dental benefits

401(k) with company match

Equity plan

Wellness stipend

Office meals

Team summits

Job summary

Rain is seeking a Head of Engineering to own the craft, quality, and technical direction of a roughly 50-person engineering organization. This role focuses on raising the engineering bar and shaping the multi-year technical roadmap to support increased transaction volume, working closely with Product, Risk, Compliance, and leadership.

You will lead through direct reports and engineering managers, review critical designs, drive reliability and CI/CD improvements, and partner with security and

Qualifications

• 15+ years building production software, including 8+ years leading engineers and meaningful time leading managers.
• Current technical credibility. You have written or reviewed meaningful production code recently enough that an architecture review is a place you add value, not a place you nod along.
• 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.
• You have hired and developed engineering managers, not only engineers. There are leaders you grew who would come 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.
• Executive range. You are as comfortable in a board or partner conversation as you are in a design review, and you can hold a technical position under commercial pressure.
• Comfort with ambiguity and speed. You would rather ship something correct this quarter than design something perfect for next year.

Responsibilities

• Own engineering strategy and architecture across card issuing, wallets, ledger, money movement, onchain settlement, and integrations with card networks and banking partners — including the multi-year technical roadmap that gets us there.
• Set and own Rain's engineering quality bar across system design, code review, testing, observability, documentation, and technical decision-making, ensuring correctness is treated as critical for systems that move customer funds.
• Go deep where the risk is. You won't own day-to-day code, but you will review critical designs, weigh in on the highest-consequence architecture and build-vs.-buy decisions, and be technical enough that no one can hand you a bad design and have it pass.
• Drive reliability, scalability, and operational excellence by establishing SLOs, improving incident response, capacity planning for 10x growth, and designing resilient systems with graceful degradation, idempotency, and replay capabilities.
• Build security, compliance, and correctness into the platform by design, partnering closely with Risk, Compliance, and Security to meet PCI, SOC 2, fraud-control, regulatory, and blockchain infrastructure requirements.
• Increase engineering velocity without sacrificing quality through improvements to CI/CD, developer tooling, local environments, technical debt management, and architecture that enables teams to ship safely and independently.
• Build and develop a high-performing engineering organization by hiring and coaching engineering managers and technical leads, establishing clear team ownership and boundaries, and owning headcount planning and the performance bar.
• Operate as a member of the leadership team — translating company strategy into technical plans, partnering across Product, Design, Risk, Compliance, and GTM, and representing engineering to the board, banking and network partners, and customers.

Skills

Engineering leadership

System design

Distributed backend systems

Payments domain

Reliability ownership

Executive communication

Hiring & mentoring

Security & compliance

Code review & architecture

Strategic planning

Job description

Rain is seeking a Head of Engineering to own the craft, quality, and technical direction of a roughly 50-person engineering organization. This role focuses on raising the engineering bar and shaping the multi-year technical roadmap to support increased transaction volume, working closely with Product, Risk, Compliance, and leadership.

You will lead through direct reports and engineering managers, review critical designs, drive reliability and CI/CD improvements, and partner with security and