Engineering Director, Backend

ENGINEERING DIRECTOR, BACKEND
Current is a leading consumer fintech platform transforming financial access for everyday Americans with over 5 million members. We provide access to financial solutions that seamlessly work together to solve the needs of our members and enable all Americans to build better financial futures. Based in NYC, our results-driven environment drives us to build better products, grow faster and empower everyone on our team to have an impact on our business and mission to improve financial outcomes.

Current’s Engineering team is dedicated to building our products and infrastructure. With our applications running on Google Cloud Kubernetes Engine, we support a proprietary banking core that can scale to handle millions of transactions a day. Our stack includes MongoDB and Spanner for persistence, Pub/Sub for asynchronous event processing, Dataflow for data transformation paired with BigQuery and Google Cloud Storage for data storage and analytics. Our backend services are written in Java and our data pipelines are built in Scala.
We work across a broad set of domains, including user-facing products like liquidity offerings and reward programs, infrastructure for machine learning and experimentation, real-time fraud detection and identity protection, and large-scale transaction processing across multiple payment rails.

We are looking for an Engineering Director to join our team in New York. You will work to lead the delivery of key business initiatives, improve existing architecture and services, and design large-scale data-intensive applications. You will be hands-on, leading your team by example and defining the standards of engineering excellence. The ideal candidate should have at least 1 year of management experience. In addition, they should have a background in backend development and experience working with cloud-hosted services.

WHAT TO EXPECT:

• Leadership responsibilities for an engineering team. Responsibility for the people in that team, as well as their delivery of features and enhancements.
• Owning the end-to-end roadmap for key business initiatives from product discovery, to system design, all the way to feature launch.
• Take an active, hands-on role in developing backend services in Java as part of your day-to-day responsibilities, leading by example in code reviews and technical design.
• Use your managerial skills to scale a team and drive forward a complex roadmap
• A strong culture of code and architecture review
• Work on large-scale data-intensive applications with cutting edge techniques in:
• Real-time transaction decisioning
• Stream-processing
• Machine learning
• Evolving the company standards for engineering excellence by helping to improve architecture, testing, and monitoring practices
• Helping Current’s users access new decentralized financial systems for wealth creation.

WHAT YOU BRING:

• 9+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 3+ years in engineering leadership roles.
• Experience leading teams at high-growth startups or product-focused tech companies.
• A strong technical foundation and ability to  guide architecture and system design decisions with confidence.
• Proven ability to scale teams, systems, and processes while keeping things lean and agile.
• Excellent communication skills.  
• You can translate between engineering, product, and executive leadership.
• Deep empathy for users, team members, and the business.
• Prior experience in a startup between 100–300 employees.
• Passion for mentoring and growing emerging engineering leaders.

BENEFITS:

• Competitive salary
• Meaningful equity in the form of stock options
• 401(k) plan
• Discretionary performance bonus program
• Biannual performance reviews
• Medical, Dental and Vision premiums covered at 100% for you and your dependents
• Flexible time off and paid holidays
• Generous parental leave policy
• Commuter benefits
• Fitness benefits
• Healthcare and Dependent care FSA benefit
• Employee Assistance Programs focused on mental health
• Healthcare advocacy program for all employees
• Access to mental health apps
• Team building activities
• Our modern Chelsea-based office with open floor plan, stocked kitchen, and catered lunches