Head of Engineering

Financial institutions process billions of transactions every day across cards, ACH, wires, and third party aggregators. But most of that data is difficult to use. Descriptions are inconsistent, merchant names don’t match, and categories vary by payment type.

Spade’s API takes these raw, messy transactions, and in <50 ms, returns clean, structured records linked to verified businesses in our proprietary database. Customers including Stripe, FIS, Bilt, Corpay, and Mercury use Spade to authorize more transactions, personalize experiences, power rewards programs, and more. We lead the market in terms of merchant coverage, speed of enrichment, and data accuracy, and enrich hundreds of billions of dollars in transaction volume every month. 

Spade is a fast growing, Series A company backed by industry experts and top tier investors (including a16z, Flourish Ventures, Y-Combinator, and Gradient Ventures). We’re a lean and execution-oriented hybrid team, passionate about building exceptional products for our growing customer base. We care deeply about diversity of opinion, background, and experience. We value empathy, curiosity, and passion, and strive to create an environment where individuals have autonomy and the ability to take ownership over their work.

What will you be doing?

Spade is an engineering driven company. Our success is predicated on our ability to deliver a high quality, reliable, and scalable product to our rapidly growing customer base. We’re looking for a product-focused engineering leader who is passionate about building a team, scaling a product, and solving some of the most challenging problems in fintech. In this role, you’ll report directly to our CEO and sit on our leadership team, representing engineering in strategic product and company decisions. You will:

• Lead, mentor, and grow our engineering team, with a focus on working across infrastructure, data pipelines, API design and product delivery
• Define and drive the engineering vision, architecture, and technical roadmap to deliver on company goals
• Work closely with the CEO to deliver customer-centric products and drive new strategic initiatives
• Foster an engineering culture of high ownership, high velocity, and high performance – empowering individuals and enabling them to do their best work
• Implement scalable engineering practices to improve shipping consistency and reliability, and support business growth
• Build out the systems and practices to scale our engineering team, identifying and onboarding high performing talent in partnership with our recruiting team
• Partner with our Head of Data & ML to foster effective collaboration across data and engineering

• Must-have: 
  • 10+ years of experience in backend engineering, including 4+ in engineering leadership
  • 5+ years of experience working on B2B, API products 
  • Passion for people management, particularly recruiting and developing technical talent
  • Experience successfully scaling an engineering team with proven results
  • High-ownership, high velocity mindset
  • Experience with some / all of the following: Python, SQL, API design, data pipelines/orchestration, cloud infrastructure, distributed systems 
  • Experience in high growth environments (startups preferred) 
• Nice-to-have: 
  • Experience in fintech, data, and/or AI products
  • Strong preference for NYC but open to remote for exceptional candidates

Why join Spade? 

• Be a cultural founder. As an early employee, you’ll play a meaningful role in defining and building our culture. 
• Get in on the ground floor. We’re a small but well-funded team – joining now comes with limited risk and unlimited upside. 
• Build the next generation of financial infrastructure. Our products will power the next wave of innovation in fintech, helping our customers deliver better, more transparent products and services to the consumer. 

Benefits include:

• Competitive compensation and equity package
• Full medical, dental, and vision benefits for US-based employees
• Life & short-term disability insurance
• Flexible PTO
• 401K for retirement planning
• Remote-friendly team, with pet-friendly headquarters in NYC
• Paid parental leave
• Work from home stipend

Spade is an equal opportunity employer, committed to building a culture that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive. We believe that having people with different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives not only helps us build the best products for our customers, but also helps us be the best version of ourselves.

As part of our commitment to health and safety, Spade requires employees to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 as permitted under applicable law.

• At Spade, we view total compensation as consisting of salary + equity + benefits. We recruit motivated and high performing talent, and work to compensate people in line with the value they bring to our team. 
• We aim to pay fairly and competitively, and consider a number of factors in developing compensation offers. These factors include years and breadth of experience, interview performance, market dynamics, and internal equity. 
• The anticipated base salary range for this role is between $250,000 and $300,000, and an equity grant.