Head of Engineering

As Head of Engineering at Rain, you own the craft, quality, and technical direction of a roughly 30-person engineering organization. You lead through direct reports and a small group of engineering managers and tech leads, partnering closely with Product, Risk, and Compliance. Your focus is making a small, senior team produce output that looks like a much larger one by raising the engineering bar, tightening the systems that move real money, and staying genuinely in the code and architecture.

What you'll do

• Set and own Rain's engineering quality bar across system design, code review, testing, observability, documentation, and technical decision-making, ensuring correctness is treated as critical for systems that move customer funds.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership by staying active in the codebase, reviewing critical PRs and designs, prototyping high-risk components, debugging production issues, and making key architectural and build-vs.-buy decisions.
• Own the technical architecture and strategy across card issuing, wallets, ledger, money movement, onchain settlement, and integrations with card networks and banking partners.
• Drive reliability, scalability, and operational excellence by establishing SLOs, improving incident response, capacity planning for 10x growth, and designing resilient systems with graceful degradation, idempotency, and replay capabilities.
• Build security, compliance, and correctness into the platform by design, partnering closely with Risk, Compliance, and Security to meet PCI, SOC 2, fraud-control, regulatory, and blockchain infrastructure requirements.
• Increase engineering velocity without sacrificing quality through improvements to CI/CD, developer tooling, local environments, technical debt management, and architecture that enables teams to ship safely and independently.
• Build and develop a high-performing engineering organization by coaching engineering managers and technical leads, maintaining a high hiring and performance bar, establishing clear team ownership, and partnering effectively across Product, Design, Risk, Compliance, and go-to-market.

What you bring

• 10+ years building production software, including 4+ years leading engineers, ideally as a Head of Engineering, Director, or Senior EM at a company where the systems handled real consequences.
• Demonstrated hands-on involvement: you have written or reviewed meaningful production code within the last year and you want a role where that continues.
• Deep experience with distributed backend systems at scale, including data modeling, consistency and idempotency, queues and event-driven design, and the operational reality of running all of it.
• A track record of raising an engineering bar with specific practices you introduced and measurable change in quality, velocity, or reliability that followed.
• Real reliability ownership: you have carried a pager, run incident command during a serious outage, and built the follow-through that kept it from recurring.
• Experience in payments, fintech, banking infrastructure, or another domain where money, ledgers, or regulatory obligations made correctness non-negotiable.
• Strong hiring and coaching instincts with managers or senior engineers you have developed who would work for you again.
• Clear written communication: you can make a complex technical tradeoff legible to a CEO, a compliance officer, and a partner's engineering team in the same week.
• Comfort with ambiguity and speed, preferring to ship something correct this quarter rather than design something perfect for next year.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with card issuing, processing, or the Visa and Mastercard network stack.
• Working knowledge of stablecoins, onchain settlement, custody and key management, or EVM and Solana infrastructure.
• Experience operating under SOC 2, PCI DSS, or bank and program-manager oversight.
• Experience leading distributed or multi-region teams.

What we offer

• Unlimited time off with a minimum of 10 days per year required.
• Flexible working: work from home, from an office, or both, plus a stipend for home workspace setup.
• Health coverage: 95% of health, dental, and vision plan costs for US employees and 90% for dependents, plus a 100% company-subsidized life insurance plan.
• 401(k) retirement plan with a 4% company match.
• Equity option plan for all employees.
• Monthly wellness stipend for gym memberships, fitness classes, massages, acupuncture, and other eligible health and wellness spending.
• In-office meals: lunch and dinner on us via DoorDash credit for those working from the office.
• Team and company offsites, both domestic and international.

About Rain

Rain is the global stablecoin payments platform for enterprises, neobanks, platforms, developers, and AI agents. As both a Visa and Mastercard Principal Member, Rain issues cards that work at more than 175 million merchant locations in over 220 countries and territories. Trusted by more than 100 organizations worldwide, Rain closed a $250M Series C in January 2026 at a $1.95B valuation, led by ICONIQ with participation from Sapphire Ventures, Dragonfly, Bessemer Venture Partners, Galaxy Ventures, FirstMark, Lightspeed, Norwest, and Endeavor Catalyst.