Scapia—Engineering Manager

Job description

Description: About Scapia Scapia is a fintech company building a travel-focused credit card experience that converts everyday spending into travel rewards. The company aims to deliver seamless financial products and travel experiences through cutting-edge technology and customer-centric innovation. We are building a high-performance engineering team that thrives on ownership, speed, and solving complex fintech challenges. Role Overview We're hiring an Engineering Manager to own one of our most critical product domains — a complex, regulated, high-stakes backend that sits at the heart of our fintech platform. This is the kind of domain where reliability, correctness, and scale all matter equally, and where the engineering decisions you make have direct business consequences. You'll be joining at an inflection point — we have a working product with real traction, and the next chapter is about building the engineering foundations that let us grow 10x without breaking. What you'll own - You'll lead a team of 5–10 backend engineers, with scope to grow. This isn't a reporting role — you'll be deeply involved in technical direction, hiring, and making the team measurably better every quarter. - Team leadership: Run a tight, high-trust engineering squad. Set the bar for code quality, system reliability, and engineering culture. Make your team better at their craft, not just faster at shipping. - Technical direction: Own architecture decisions across your domain — APIs, service design, data flows, and third-party integrations. Hands-on enough to review designs and challenge tradeoffs, not just sign off on them. - Hiring and growth: Scale the team deliberately. Own the full hiring funnel for your squad — sourcing, bar-raising, onboarding. Develop senior engineers into tech leads. - Reliability and observability: Drive SLA discipline. Own uptime, on-call health, incident response quality, and RCA process for your domain. We care about this a lot — it's part of our engineering culture, not an afterthought. - Cross-functional collaboration: Partner with Product, Risk, Compliance, and external partners. Translate business constraints (and there are real ones in fintech) into clean technical solutions. - Process and velocity: We're adding structure without losing startup speed. Help us build the right amount of process—enough to ship reliably, not so much that we slow down. Since we don't have a dedicated QA team, you and the team are responsible for shipping quality changes to production, and regression suites will play a critical role in ensuring stability. - AI-first SDLC culture: Leverage AI to transform our software development lifecycle, building an AI-first engineering culture that boosts team productivity, innovation, and code quality. The Real Challenge This isn't a simple CRUD product domain. You're dealing with: - Multi-vendor orchestration: The same user journeys run across multiple external partners with different APIs, SLAs, and failure modes. Keeping this reliable and debuggable is genuinely hard. - Regulated complexity: Compliance-mandated flows, deduplication, and third-party verification checks aren't optional. Your systems need to be both correct and auditable under regulatory scrutiny. - Stateful, complex workflows: Core flows involve many states, retry logic, and idempotency requirements. Making these resilient and testable — while the product team wants to add new flows — is an ongoing engineering challenge. - Scale without rewrite: We need to go from where we are to 10x the load without a greenfield rebuild. That means thoughtful incremental improvements, not big-bang migrations. Profile: We care more about how you lead than where you've led. That said, here's what typically makes someone successful in this role: Must-haves - 3+ years managing backend engineering teams directly — you've hired, grown, and occasionally had hard conversations with engineers. - Strong backend engineering depth — you can read a distributed systems design and find the flaw, even if you're not writing the code day-to-day. - Track record of improving team reliability and delivery — not just shipping features, but making the team better at shipping them. - Comfortable with ambiguity — Scapia moves fast, priorities shift, and you'll need to bring structure rather than wait for it. Nice-to-have - Experience with fintech, payments, or regulated financial products — you know what 'idempotency' means in a banking context. - AWS / cloud-native infrastructure experience — our stack runs on ECS, and you'll need to care about how services are deployed, not just written. - Prior startup experience — you know the difference between good process and process theatre.