Responsibilities
- Ensure consistent delivery of committed scope on schedule across all tribes and the entire engineering function, owning practices to identify shortfalls early and implement remediation.
- Set and enforce engineering standards including code review, retrospectives, and feedback loops to maintain quality across tribes.
- Manage Engineering Managers through performance management, growth, one-on-one meetings, and hiring, holding them accountable for their development and operational standards.
- Own and define the unified software development lifecycle end-to-end, with Engineering Managers executing it daily in their tribes.
- Govern the deployment pipeline to ensure all changes generate an automatic audit trail compliant with regulatory requirements, while designing a risk-tiered approval process that subjects significant changes to rigorous review without hindering daily production velocity.
- Drive genuine adoption of AI tools across engineering, including coding assistants, AI-assisted code review, and AI-assisted test generation, setting direction, evaluating value, tracking adoption, and ensuring measurable productivity gains.
- Ensure fast escalation and resolution of blockers within sprints and engineers' backlogs, preventing them from aging.
- Own the engineering response to production incidents, including timely escalation, structured post-mortem facilitation, and closure of action items.
- Manage the function-level technical debt roadmap, prioritizing remediation, collaborating with the Solutions Architect on architectural debt, and tracking progress.
- Ensure engineering capacity matches committed work, with Engineering Managers executing operational planning.
- Implement quality, security, and architecture standards defined by the Head of Quality Engineering, Security, and the Architecture Advice Forum.
- Own engineering OKRs rolled up from Engineering Managers, with function-level accountability.
- Ensure engineering does not block cross-functional initiatives spanning product, technology, and operational teams, coordinating prioritization and dependency management across divisions.
Requirements
- At least 8 years in software engineering, including 3–4 years in an engineering leadership role managing multiple teams or squads, specifically engineering managers.
- Proven track record of owning delivery predictability at the function level, making commitments on behalf of an engineering organization and building practices to meet them consistently without estimate-padding.
- Hands-on experience building and running engineering practices such as SDLC definition, code review standards, change management, and feedback loops.
- Strong people leadership with experience hiring, developing, and performance-managing engineering managers, and recognizing effective execution versus need for intervention.
- Clear, evidence-based perspective on AI-assisted development across the SDLC, identifying where it adds real value and driving genuine adoption.
- Solid understanding of backend distributed systems and their operation in regulated, high-stakes environments, including change management discipline, incident response, observability, and audit-readiness.
- Data-driven approach, comfortable owning engineering metrics like delivery predictability, cycle time, defect escape rate, and blocker aging, and translating them into prioritized actions.
- Strong communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences, able to write SDLC definitions, present tech-debt roadmaps to the CTO, and deliver hard feedback to engineering managers.
- Experience in a regulated environment such as fintech, banking, or payments, with appreciation for the impact of quality or security failures when customer funds are at stake.
Nice to Have
- Background in crypto, Bitcoin, custody, or blockchain-adjacent engineering, with familiarity of the domain risk profile.
- Experience working in a Team Topologies organizational model, including Stream Aligned, Platform, and Enabling team dynamics.
- Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools beyond standard code completion, such as test generation or review automation.
- Experience with observability tools like Coralogix or Datadog in an incident response context.
- Multi-tribe or multi-squad coordination at the function level in a fully remote, globally distributed engineering organization.
- Contributions to engineering culture externally through writing, talks, or open-source work reflecting engineering excellence.
- Experience in mobile-first organizations where iOS and Android are core business products.
Work Arrangement
Remote (Worldwide) — Work from Anywhere
Other
- A dedicated workspace.
- A reliable internet connection with the fastest speed possible in your area.
- Alignment with Our Values and the Xapo Values-Driven Leadership principles.
