Astra
Engineering Manager
1mo ago
USALeadRemotemicroservicesarchitecturepayment processingfraud detectionfinancial compliance
Engineering Manager role leading and mentoring a fintech engineering team while contributing hands-on to complex financial systems development.
Responsibilities
- We're looking for an Engineering Manager to contribute to leading and growing our engineering team while remaining deeply hands-on in the architecture and development of complex financial systems that process millions of dollars daily. This is a player-coach role — you'll drive technical direction and mentor your team while continuing to contribute meaningfully as an engineer yourself. You'll be central to designing cross-domain solutions that coordinate payments, fraud detection, compliance, and user management across our distributed microservices architecture.
- This role requires deep systems thinking, technical leadership, and the proven ability to both build sophisticated systems and build the engineers who build them.
- Contribute to the codebase as a technical force multiplier : filling gaps, improving quality, and modeling engineering standards.
- Lead and Develop Your Team : Manage a team of backend engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, ownership, and continuous growth. Conduct regular 1:1s, provide mentorship, and support career development across all levels of the team.
- Architect Critical Financial Systems : Design and implement payment processing, fraud detection, and compliance systems that handle millions of dollars daily with strict regulatory requirements — and guide your team in doing the same.
- Drive Technical Decisions : Own architecture decisions that impact the entire platform, establishing best practices and engineering standards as the organization scales.
- Stay Hands-On : Contribute directly to complex engineering work — this is not a purely managerial role. You'll write code, participate in design reviews, and remain an active technical voice on the team.
- Lead Cross-Domain Solutions : Coordinate complex interactions between payments, fraud detection, user management, and compliance systems across a distributed microservices architecture.
- Partner Across the Organization : Collaborate closely with product, compliance, and other engineering teams to design systems that meet both business and regulatory requirements.
- Build Engineering Culture : Establish coding standards, design patterns, and engineering practices that will define the team's culture from the ground up.
- Manage Delivery : Balance technical quality with business velocity — plan engineering work, remove blockers, and ensure the team ships reliably.
Nice to have
- Financial Systems : Payment processing, fraud detection, or compliance systems
- Financial Regulations : Understanding of AML, KYC, PCI DSS, or similar regulatory frameworks
- Banking Integrations : Experience with financial APIs and money movement systems
- High-Scale Systems : Experience with systems processing high transaction volumes
- Third-Party Integrations : Experience coordinating multiple external service integrations
Conditions
- Competitive compensation with equity in a growing fintech company
- Remote-first culture with flexible working arrangements
- Small team, big impact - your work directly shapes our platform
- Professional growth - lead technical decisions and mentor team members
- Modern tech stack - work with cutting-edge cloud technologies
- Mission-driven - build systems that power financial innovation
How to apply
- We're looking for engineers who are excited by complex systems problems and have the educational background and experience to handle sophisticated challenges. If you're passionate about building mission-critical financial infrastructure and want to have a direct impact on our technical direction, we'd love to hear from you.
Other
- Astra is a high-impact engineering team building mission-critical financial infrastructure. Our fintech platform powers payment processing, fraud detection, and financial compliance for businesses handling 100M+ in weekly transaction volume. We maintain 99.9%+ uptime, process complex cross-border payments, and coordinate with multiple third-party financial services while meeting strict regulatory requirements.
- 7+ years of software engineering experience building complex, production systems
- 2+ years of experience leading an engineering team, including performance management and hiring
- Demonstrated experience as a player-coach — comfortable moving between technical execution and team leadership
- Proven track record of solving complex, cross-domain engineering challenges in production environments
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field required
- Master's degree in Computer Science or Engineering from an accredited university highly preferred
- Backend Development : Python (we use Python 3), strong understanding of web frameworks and APIs
- Database Design : Experience with both NoSQL and SQL databases
- Cloud Infrastructure : Google Cloud Platform or similar cloud platforms
- Architecture Patterns : Domain-driven design, clean architecture, CQRS
- System Design : Ability to design systems that balance performance, maintainability, and business requirements
- Distributed Systems : Event-driven architectures, microservices, and high-scale system design
- Strong communicator who can translate complex technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders
- Experience setting technical direction and building alignment across engineering and product teams
- Ability to hire, onboard, and grow engineering talent
- Comfortable navigating ambiguity and making decisions with incomplete information
- Direct Impact : You'll lead a core part of a small engineering team building systems that power a growing fintech platform
- Architecture Influence : Drive technical decisions that will scale with the business
- Team Building : Shape engineering practices, culture, and the people who carry them forward
- Complex Problems : Work on sophisticated challenges at the intersection of engineering and finance
- Financial Innovation : Build and lead the teams building systems that enable new financial products and services
- Astra is a remote-first company hiring only within the U.S. We value thoughtful collaboration, clarity, and initiative. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team.