Director of Engineering - Forward

About The Role

As Director of Engineering, you own the technical direction, delivery, and culture of the engineering organization.

You’ll partner closely with the founders on company strategy, with product on what we build, and with customers on what we ship. Your job is to scale the team, sharpen execution, and ensure we continue to ship quickly without compromising on the things that matter (especially when money is involved).

This is a hands-on leadership role. You’ll be in architecture discussions, involved in critical code reviews, and present for the hardest technical and product decisions. We are not looking for a pure people manager who has stepped away from the work.

What You’ll Do

Lead the organization
Build, manage, and develop a high-performing team of senior engineers and engineering managers. Set a high bar for hiring, performance, and engineering quality.

Own delivery
Establish the systems, rituals, and accountability needed to ship predictably and at high quality.

Set technical direction
Partner with founders and senior engineers on architecture, platform investments, and key build vs. buy decisions.

Drive our agentic AI strategy
Identify where AI agents meaningfully improve our product and operations—and turn those ideas into production systems.

Build and scale a high-talent team
Own talent density. Attract, close, and retain exceptional engineers, and ensure every hire raises the bar. Be directly involved in senior hiring and act as a final decision-maker when needed. Design the org, leveling, and onboarding systems that let us scale quickly without compromising quality—and address underperformance decisively.

Partner across the business
Work closely with product, design, and go-to-market to decide what to build, when to ship, and how to position it.

Raise the operational bar
Own reliability, security, observability, on-call, and incident response. We move money—our standards are high by default.

Run the organization on metrics
Define and own the metrics that matter across product, platform, and team. Build the dashboards and feedback loops that make performance visible—and use them to drive prioritization, accountability, and decision-making at every level.

What We’re Looking For

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years leading engineers and engineering managers
• Track record of scaling engineering teams at high-growth startups (ideally ~10 → 50+ engineers)
• Strong technical depth—you’ve built and operated distributed systems and can actively contribute in design reviews
• Experience in fintech, payments, or other regulated, money-moving domains; strong instincts around reliability, idempotency, and correctness
• Familiarity with our ecosystem: TypeScript, Next.js, modern Node runtimes (Bun/Hono), Kafka, and AWS-based infrastructure
• Clear thinking and hands-on experience with AI-native systems, or a well-developed perspective on how to apply agentic AI effectively
• Excellent communication—you can align engineers, executives, and customers around complex tradeoffs
• Strong bias toward shipping—measured by real systems in production, not plans
• Strong data fluency—you don’t rely on intuition alone. You instrument systems and teams effectively, use metrics to drive decisions, and know the difference between signal and noise

Our Stack

• Application: TypeScript, Next.js, Bun, Hono, Drizzle ORM
• Data: PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, RisingWave, Apache Iceberg
• Streaming: Kafka
• Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes (EKS)
• AI: Agentic systems built on frontier models

Why Forward

• Work on foundational financial infrastructure that other companies will build on
• Founding team with multiple successful exits and deep operational experience
• Strong funding, real revenue, and a credible path to a category-defining outcome
• Competitive salary, meaningful equity, and full benefits

Location

Austin, Tx