Director of Engineering

Director of Engineering Remote, North America · Reports to the CEO About Pipe Pipe builds embedded capital for small businesses. We deliver credit products inside the software platforms SMBs already use to run their business: vertical SaaS, payments platforms and marketplaces. A merchant sees a pre-approved offer on the platform, reads the terms in seconds, accepts in four clicks, and repays as they earn. Behind that sit credit risk models, partner APIs and SDKs, money movement, and capital markets systems. Our capital is live inside Uber Eats Manager, Boulevard, Housecall Pro, GoCardless and other partners, across the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Pipe’s revenue has accelerated almost 2.5 times year on year and is on track for profitability in the next few quarters. This candidate will work directly with the management team, have a core impact on the P&L and evolve an already model tech stack for new use cases in five countries. We are remote-first. We ship fast, hold each other to a high bar, and leave egos at the door. The role You own Pipe's engineering output. This is a hands-on leadership role. You are in the codebase, in the architecture decisions, and in the incident channel when something breaks. You find the technical gaps, build the systems that scale with the business, and match engineering speed to what the business needs. You lead about 10 engineers and stay technical enough to pair with an engineer or debug a production issue yourself. What you'll do Technical leadership and architecture • Own the health, scalability and reliability of Pipe's systems end to end, from partner-facing APIs and SDKs to money movement, capital markets infrastructure and AI/ML model infrastructure for credit underwriting. • Make and defend architectural decisions. Stay close enough to the code to know when a proposed design will not hold. • Set standards for code quality, testing, deployment and incident response that the team follows. • Sequence the technical roadmap against speed, scale and risk, starting with credit operations, liquidity tooling and partner integrations. Team leadership and execution • Lead about 10 engineers through two squad leads. Set the technical bar. Unblock people directly. • Create clarity and momentum, and hold a pace the team can sustain. • Build a culture where engineers make the call and defend it. • Recruit, mentor and develop engineers as the team grows. Cross-functional execution • Work with Product on scope, sequence and delivery. • Work with Risk and Data Science so infrastructure supports credit decisioning at scale. • Work with Capital Markets and Finance on money movement, reconciliation and reporting. • Represent engineering in partner technical conversations, including API and SDK integrations with platform partners. Operational rigor • Own incident response and production reliability. You are in the room when something breaks, not told afterwards. • Build monitoring, alerting and on-call practices that catch issues before partners see them. • Improve code review, deployment and testing to raise velocity and hold quality. What we're looking for Required • 6+ years in software engineering, including 2+ years leading a team of 5 or more engineers. • Experience at a fintech, a payments company, or another company running regulated financial systems. • Hands-on: you review code, debug production issues and make architectural calls yourself. • Track record of scaling engineering teams and systems at an early-stage or high-growth startup. • Experience owning business-critical infrastructure. Uptime, reliability and security are not optional at Pipe. • You work well with Product, Risk, Data Science, Capital Markets and Finance. • First-principles operato