Technical Lead (Engineer), Banking-as-a-Service

Vantaca; Wilmington (NC); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision benefits

Unlimited PTO

401K with company match

Remote flexible – come to office when/

Job summary

Vantaca is seeking a Technical Lead Engineer to shape the Banking-as-a-Service platform. You will lead the BaaS architecture, drive API contracts, and own onboarding with banking partners, ensuring regulatory compliance and secure, scalable payment flows.

Join a fintech-native team building scalable, compliant financial infrastructure that moves dollars reliably and transparently, with AI-assisted tooling and a strong focus on developer experience.

Qualifications

• 7–10 years in backend engineering on banking platforms.
• Deep knowledge of distributed systems and API design.
• Experience with event-driven architectures and financial transactions.
• Familiarity with NACHA rules, AML/BSA basics, and regulatory controls.
• Experience with AI-assisted development tooling.
• Experience shipping or operating financial transaction systems.

Responsibilities

• Lead engineering for Vantaca’s BaaS layer, including ACH/transfers and real-time events.
• Ensure NACHA compliance and bank-partner obligations.
• Collaborate with compliance and partners to embed controls in the platform.
• Own incident response and root-cause analysis for payment or banking failures.
• Design and evolve event-driven architecture for reliability and scalability.
• Define API contracts and governance for internal and external consumers.
• Own onboarding lifecycle for banking partners, KYC/KYB hooks, and funding flows.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

Event-driven architectures

API design

Banking platform experience

AI-assisted tooling

Compliance awareness

Partner integrations

Tools

Kafka

Azure Service Bus

Sila/Column/Increase/Unit (BaaS)

Job description

About Vantaca

Powered by AI, Vantaca's vision is big! We are the leading AI-native community management performance platform that enables owners and operators, community management teams, boards and associations to work smarter, faster, and with unprecedented insight. More than just accounting and management software, Vantaca is intelligent business operating software that leverages artificial intelligence to automate routine work, surface actionable insights, and help our customers increase revenue, efficiency, flexibility, and control.

About Vantaca

Powered by AI, Vantaca's vision is big! We are the leading AI-native community management performance platform that enables owners and operators, community management teams, boards and associations to work smarter, faster, and with unprecedented insight. More than just accounting and management software, Vantaca is intelligent business operating software that leverages artificial intelligence to automate routine work, surface actionable insights, and help our customers increase revenue, efficiency, flexibility, and control.

Overview

Vantaca is the operating system for community association management and we're building the financial infrastructure layer that makes it run. Our Banking as a Service (BaaS) platform is Vantaca's programmatic banking layer: the engine behind per-association account structures, ACH/NACHA payment rails, real-time bank file processing, and compliant fund movement at scale

Vantaca is a unicorn-stage, vertical SaaS platform purpose-built for community association management. We’re past early-stage chaos and squarely in the phase of building durable, scalable systems that will power thousands of associations and millions of homeowners

We're looking for a Technical Lead Engineer to help design and architect our growing Banking-as-a-Service platform. This is a foundational role: you'll shape how Vantaca connects to banking partners, define the API contracts that downstream teams and clients build on, and ensure every dollar we move is compliant, traceable, and reliable. If you've shipped event-driven payment systems at companies like Stripe, Modern Treasury, Increase, or Meow, or aspire to bring that caliber of engineering rigor to a high-growth vertical SaaS, this role was written for you.

BaaS is one of Vantaca’s most strategically important investments. You won’t be maintaining a legacy payments layer, you’ll be architecting a greenfield banking platform with modern tooling, real banking partners, and a tight product loop with customers who care deeply about where their money goes.

What You'll Own

Banking Infrastructure & Compliance

• Lead engineering for Vantaca’s BaaS layer, including outgoing ACH/transfers, incoming bank file ingestion, per-association account management, and real-time event processing.
• Ensure all systems meet NACHA operational rules, bank partner contractual obligations, and emerging regulatory requirements for embedded banking.
• Partner with compliance, legal, and BaaS providers to operationalize controls into the platform rather than bolting them on afterward.
• Own incident response and root cause analysis for any payment or banking system failures.

Event-Driven Architecture

• Design and evolve the event-driven architecture underpinning BaaS, from bank file arrival through ledger reconciliation and downstream notification.
• Drive reliability, idempotency, and observability standards across async payment flows; build for fault tolerance in a domain where errors have financial consequences.
• Define event contracts and schema ownership practices that allow other Vantaca pods to consume banking events safely.

API Design & Developer Experience

• Own the design and versioning of BaaS-facing APIs consumed by internal teams, partner integrations, and client-facing surfaces.
• Apply API-first thinking: define contracts before building, enforce backward compatibility, and ensure external-grade quality on APIs used by bank and property management clients.
• Collaborate with Platform and Integrations leads to establish consistent API governance standards across Vantaca engineering.

Bank & Client Onboarding

• Own the technical onboarding lifecycle for new banking partners — from integration spec through certification and production cutover.
• Build and maintain the client onboarding pipeline for associations joining Vantaca’s banking products, including account provisioning, KYC/KYB hooks, and initial funding flows.
• Work closely with Product and Customer Success to reduce time-to-live for new banking clients without sacrificing compliance.

Requirements

• 7-10 years of experience, ideally working on a banking platform.
• 7-10 years of deep, backend engineering with hands-on experience in distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and API design.
• Experience with AI-assisted development tooling and an interest in evolving SDLC practices.
• Experience shipping or operating systems that process financial transactions, ideally ACH, wire, or real-time payments.
• Familiarity with banking compliance concepts: NACHA rules, AML/BSA basics, Reg E, and how compliance requirements translate into engineering controls.
• Proven track record of defining and evolving external or internal APIs with a developer-first mindset.
• Comfort navigating bank partner relationships and technical certifications.

Preferred

• Hands-on experience with BaaS platforms or sponsor bank integrations (e.g., Column, Increase, Unit, Sila, or similar).
• Background at a fintech-native company where payment reliability and compliance were first-class engineering concerns
• Experience with event streaming infrastructure (Kafka, Azure Service Bus, or similar) in a financial context.
• Exposure to property management, HOA, or real estate tech — helpful but not required.

Core Values

• Always Growing: Likes change and enjoys finding new ways to improve their knowledge and the platform. Always ready to learn quickly about emerging AI technologies and infrastructure patterns, helping themselves and the team grow.
• Win as a Team: Builds trust and works together by making sure everyone communicates well. Actively involved in daily platform work, working closely with engineering teams, listening to their infrastructure needs, and celebrating technical successes together.
• Accountability Starts with Me: Notices platform problems and takes personal action to solve them. Takes ownership of platform performance, reliability, and the success of internal customers building on the platform.
• Unwavening Commitment to Customer Experience: Regularly talks to internal customers (product teams, engineers), taking personal responsibility to understand what they need from the platform, address infrastructure concerns, and make their development experience better with improved platform capabilities.
• Innovate Boldly: We challenge the status quo and push technical boundaries to create meaningful change. We act with urgency and purpose, knowing that platform innovation drives our AI-native product success.

Why You Should Join Our Team

• AI-First Product Culture - Build the intelligent infrastructure that powers AI innovation at scale
• Our eNPS is +68! (Google it, that is great)
• Benefits: Medical, Dental, and Vision kick in day one
• Unlimited PTO (with a requirement for employees to take a minimum of one continuous week per year)
• 401K with Company Match
• Remote Flexible - come to the office when needed
• Great parental leave benefits
• Named on Inc 5000 list of America's Fastest Growing Private Companies
• Named on Inc 5000 Vet 100 Private Companies list multiple years in a row
• Winner of Coastal Entrepreneur Award, Technology Category
• Active employee-led Culture Committee
• Ongoing industry and professional development trainings available to all employees
• Multiple leaders on the executive committee recognized as 40 under 40 recipients for contributions to business and community
• We're playing offense to win! Our product market fit and our world-class employees make us the leader in our space. We're building something cool and people like it here

We receive many resumes for our open positions and each one is reviewed by a human being on our recruiting team. We will compare your background with the qualifications and requirements for the position. If you are selected for an interview you will receive an e‑mail from someone on our recruiting team with an @vantaca.com email address. It may take some time for us to review all of the applications so give us some time to respond. We appreciate your interest in this role.