Engineering Manager

Engineering Manager

About the company:

We're a mission-driven fintech using AI to widen access to credit for people the formal financial system has historically left behind. Our apps have been installed more than 50 million times across markets in India and Africa, where non-traditional data and machine learning let us assess and lend to customers whom conventional scoring would turn away. With investors that include Andreessen Horowitz, Visa, and the IFC behind us, we pair measurable social impact with engineering built for scale.

In India, we're a regulated digital lender and RBI-classified Middle Layer NBFC managing an AUM of around ?2,000 crore, serving customers nationwide with products they can genuinely trust. More than 250 of us work here across product, engineering, data science, risk, and operations, and the team is expanding quickly to solve problems that matter at real scale.

About the role:

In this Engineering Manager role, you'll lead a compact team of engineers focused on a specific slice of our product and platform stack, top to bottom. You'll work hand in hand with stakeholders across the business to hit our shared objectives, and you'll partner with other leaders to shape the structures and processes we need as the organization keeps growing.

We're a company obsessed with our customers, undaunted by obstacles, and guided by data. On the engineering side, innovation flows from the bottom up and decisions are made close to the work: we're convinced a great idea is as likely to come from a new joiner as a veteran, and we work hard to make sure everyone feels free to put forward answers to whatever's blocking us. We want people who do their best work in a fast-moving, inventive, customer-first environment.

Responsibilities:

- Lead a group of engineers who build and operate live systems, and own the outcomes: what ships, how good it is, and what it costs to run.

- Shape a deliberate, long-range technical strategy together with your team and fellow leaders - one that plans for what's coming while staying grounded in today's realities. Set an ambitious direction for your team, for Engineering, and for the company at large.

- Run the whole delivery arc across one or more parallel efforts: scoping, sequencing, estimating, executing, and staying on the hook after launch.

- Own the engineering standards your team lives by: a healthy review culture, disciplined testing, strong observability, sound security, and responsible use of AI.

- Hire, develop, and empower ambitious engineers, holding a high bar for ownership, real impact, and technical craft.

- Foster a collaborative culture that lives our values: deep care for customers, courage in the face of obstacles, and decisions grounded in data.

- Stay a hands-on contributor and mentor, ready to dig into the technical work yourself whenever it helps.

- Make your team's work visible across the company through crisp written updates, solid metrics, and forums that are actually run well.

Qualifications:

- 7+ years building production software, including roughly 2 years directly managing engineers (people management, not just a tech-lead role).

- A history of taking meaningful systems from idea to launch in a structured, well-run fashion, and keeping them healthy in production at serious scale.

- Deep grounding in server-side or full-stack engineering, large-scale distributed systems, and how data gets structured - plus the confidence to be the person your team defers to on technical calls. Having worked outside pure backend, in areas such as AI or on mobile, counts firmly in your favor.

- Genuinely fluent with AI-assisted coding tools, with a well-formed view of where they earn their keep and where they fall short.

- Experience hiring engineers and lifting a team's standard steadily, tough performance decisions included.

- Clear, well-structured communication in writing and speech, and comfort working effectively async.

How we think about engineering managers:

The traits below reflect instincts formed over many years of shipping production software through teams. We look for a real appreciation of why they matter, honest self-awareness about where you stand, and the hunger to close it.

Craft and judgment:

- You lead on architecture. You see across systems, catch the coupling that will bite in six months, and guide the team toward designs sized to the problem.

- You get into the code when it counts - not to make a point or outshine the people you manage, but to stay close to the systems you're responsible for, clear a critical blocker, or take on what no one else can.

- Your reviews raise everyone's game: you notice what slips past others, spell out the why, and send engineers away better than they arrived.

- You weigh technical excellence against business and customer needs, researching and gathering perspectives to land on the best answer rather than the quickest, and paying down technical debt before it compounds.

- You bring depth across software fundamentals, data design, and distributed systems, reaching for battle-tested patterns to keep code modular and scalable, with security, performance, and observability built in from the outset.

- You treat automated tests as both a design tool and a refactoring safety net, and you hold every contribution - yours, a teammate's, or an AI's - to the same bar.

- You move confidently through unfamiliar code, evolving existing systems carefully and validating your changes with peers.

- You slice ambiguous work into estimable pieces, and the dates you give are ones the rest of the team can safely plan around.

- You think in ripple effects - how a choice lands for the user, the business, and future velocity.

- You shape the work with product and design rather than just receiving it, pushing back when a spec is off and helping decide whether something is worth building at all.

Working with AI:

- You define what good AI use looks like for the team, flagging the strong and the sloppy and pulling along engineers who aren't there yet. Someone who won't engage with these tools reads, to you, as underperforming.

- You understand what's happening beneath modern AI systems - retrieval, tool calling, agents, MCP, evaluation, and their respective tradeoffs - deeply enough to judge well what your team ought to build.

- You teach calibration. Knowing when to lean on AI, when to double-check, and when to overrule it is a skill, and you develop that instinct in your engineers on purpose rather than by luck.

- You use AI to sharpen your thinking, not replace it - decomposing problems before you prompt so you stay in control of the architecture.

- You review AI output as rigorously as human code, with a nose for plausible-but-wrong solutions and tests that pass without proving anything. You own the final result and can articulate exactly why you overrode a suggestion.

- You curate what context a tool sees to keep signal high, and you sense when a prompt speeds you up versus when a problem calls for quiet, independent thought.

- You take AI-era security seriously - prompt injection, data leakage, secret handling - because "agentic" should never mean "unguarded."

- You automate the repetitive so your focus stays on the decisions that genuinely need a human.

- You keep pace with a fast-moving landscape, understand the tools you rely on, and raise your own ceiling as they improve.

How you lead:

- You develop the people on your team. You have a real read on each engineer's strengths, weak spots, and ambitions, you hand out assignments that push their limits, and your feedback actually connects.

- You're good at hiring: you see potential before it's obvious, describe the role without spin, and decide well when the signal is murky. You also know the wrong hire is pricier to a team than an unfilled one.

- You deliver projects that actually land, staying ahead of scope, sequencing, risk, dependencies, and tradeoffs instead of forever catching up to them.

- You articulate a sharp vision and hold the team to it - every person on it could tell you what they're building and the reason for it, no document required.

- You think in quarters, not just sprints, making calls that stay sound over time and explaining the logic to engineers, peers, and leaders in language that fits each.

- You decide under ambiguity. Most hard calls don't come with a tidy answer; you make one anyway, own the result, and adjust as the evidence shifts.

- You manage stakeholders so the team doesn't have to - soaking up the noise yourself, passing on only what counts, and keeping the rest off the team's plate.

- You understand how your organization truly works - how calls actually get made, whose presence a decision needs, and how to advance things without creating drag.

- You take the busywork out of your own reporting, so that surfacing the team's work through updates, metrics, and dashboards never eats into the team's time.

How you operate:

- You guard the quality bar for the whole team, not just your own output. Nothing goes out half-baked anywhere the team touches, and no debt is taken on without a repayment plan attached. Whatever standard your team ships to, you're the one who decided to hold it there.

- You keep communication flowing in every direction with purpose - writing clearly enough that decisions stay decided, running meetings tight enough to earn their time, and saying hard things plainly.

- You raise up the managers around you, not only your own group - passing along what works, naming what doesn't, and counting the wider engineering org's wins as part of your own job.

- You make fast, high-quality decisions - moving quickly where mistakes are cheap and reversible, slowing down where they aren't, and able to say which of the two you're in.

- You're entrepreneurial and self-managing, steering your own time, focus, and standards without being watched, and heading off problems before they surface.

- You learn fast and recover from setbacks without losing steam, with the grit to push through rough patches and the judgment to pull in help at the right moment.

- You have relentless attention to detail - spotting the inconsistent behavior, the corner-case defect, and the passing test suite that actually checks nothing - while holding the line on the little things that quietly define quality.

- You make the complicated simple, writing as though you expect to be read and asking the pointed questions that surface hidden risk.

- To you, engineering is a collective effort - you raise the people around you with straight feedback, genuine listening, and real investment in your peers getting better.

- Intellectual honesty is a default for you - you update your view when the facts say so, give credit where it's due, and never cling to an idea merely because it came from you.

- You act with integrity - making the right choice when no one's watching, flagging worries before they grow, and treating the trust of customers, colleagues, and the wider business as a thing you re-earn every single day.

- What you ship, you own. The design and the code are maybe half of what the role asks; the rest is verifying behavior, watching it run in production, documenting it, and standing behind it when something goes wrong.

- You're disciplined in how you work alongside others, communicating in async-friendly ways, keeping your commitments and calendar dependable, and showing up for the shared rituals that keep a team humming.

Skills

Engineering Management, Technical Architect, System Architecture, Distributed Systems, IT Product Architecture