Director of Engineering

Job Description:

• You own Cardiff's engineering department: the in-house engineering team, our outside contractors and offshore Salesforce developers, and the vendor relationships our roadmap depends on.
• You report to the Managing Partner and sit on the leadership team alongside operations, sales, underwriting, marketing, and finance; those departments are your internal customers.
• You'll set the delivery cadence, decide what gets built and what gets bought, keep production healthy, and be the single person the business goes to for a straight answer on status.
• The team is small and senior. Expect roughly 60% leading (planning, prioritization, review, unblocking, hiring) and 40% building; the ratio shifts toward building when we're behind.
• Cross-department program management runs in parallel to you rather than under you, and underwriting decisioning is owned by a dedicated hire who works directly with the Underwriting department.
• You'll partner with both; you won't be carrying their calendars.
• Delivery. Every committed date in the department, including the ones you inherit.
• The team. Hiring, onboarding, one-on-ones, performance, and growth for in-house engineers and contractors; you'll inherit an open Senior Full-Stack Engineer (AI-Native) req and run that search.
• The platform. Our Salesforce/Fundingo core, the Cardiff API, Snowflake, cloud infrastructure, and the migration path off legacy systems.
• AI products in production. Customer-facing agents for collections, renewals, and win-back campaigns, plus internal agents that take work off people's plates.
• The knowledge layer. The graph and the pipelines that feed it, and the standard that new systems connect to it.
• Vendors. Technical evaluation, integration ownership, and honest reporting on whether a vendor is earning its invoice.
• Production quality and security. Uptime, data integrity, access control, and the incident response when something breaks.

Requirements:

• 8+ years building production software, with 3+ years managing engineers directly; you've run a team of 4 or more
• A track record of hitting dates on projects you owned, and a clear story about a date you missed and what you did about it
• Still technical: you've written and shipped production code in the last year, and you can read a pull request and catch what's wrong with it
• Agent systems in production, not prototypes: orchestration loops, graphs, multi-step tool use, multi-agent patterns, RAG over real data, and evals you actually run
• Coding agents as your primary way of building; Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or similar, with a recent example of delivering something 3-5x faster than you could have without them
• Range across the stack: Python, modern JavaScript/TypeScript, SQL, REST/GraphQL, and cloud deployment (AWS preferred)
• Build-vs-adopt judgment: fluent enough in the open-source AI ecosystem to reach for a strong community project rather than hand-rolling what already exists
• Communication discipline: you escalate early in writing, and your stakeholders always know where things stand
• Nice to have: Knowledge graphs, entity resolution, or unified data layers built for machine consumption
• Fintech, lending, payments, or another regulated data environment
• Salesforce APIs, Snowflake, or replacing a CRM-as-application architecture
• Contributions to open-source AI projects
• Experience as the most senior technical person in a small company

Benefits:

• Performance bonus of up to 30% of base, tied to delivery and business outcomes
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage
• 401(k) plan
• Flexible PTO and observed holidays
• Remote-first, with support for your home-office setup
• Direct access to leadership and to the problems that matter