Director of Engineering

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• You are responsible for leading Cardiff's engineering department, which includes the in-house engineering team, external contractors, offshore Salesforce developers, and the vendor relationships critical to our roadmap.

• Reporting to the Managing Partner, you will be a member of the leadership team alongside operations, sales, underwriting, marketing, and finance; these departments are your internal clients.

• You will establish the delivery cadence, determine what should be developed internally versus acquired, maintain production health, and serve as the sole point of contact for the business regarding status updates.

• The team is compact and experienced, with approximately 60% of your time focused on leadership activities (planning, prioritization, reviews, unblocking, hiring) and 40% on development; this ratio may lean more towards development if deadlines are tight.

• Cross-department program management will operate alongside your role rather than under your supervision, with underwriting decision-making handled by a dedicated individual who collaborates directly with the Underwriting department.

• You will collaborate with both departments; however, you will not manage their schedules.

• You will oversee the delivery of every committed date within the department, including those inherited from prior leadership.

• Your responsibilities will include team management: hiring, onboarding, conducting one-on-ones, and facilitating performance and growth for both in-house engineers and contractors; you will inherit an open Senior Full-Stack Engineer (AI-Native) position and lead that recruitment process.

• The platform encompasses our Salesforce/Fundingo core, the Cardiff API, Snowflake, cloud infrastructure, and the transition strategy from legacy systems.

• You will manage AI products already in production, including customer-facing agents for collections, renewals, and win-back campaigns, as well as internal agents that alleviate workload.

• You will oversee the knowledge layer, including the graph and the pipelines that support it, along with the standards for connecting new systems to it.

• Your role will include vendor management, encompassing technical evaluation, integration oversight, and transparent reporting on vendor performance relative to their invoices.

• You will ensure production quality and security, focusing on uptime, data integrity, access control, and incident response protocols when issues arise.

⛳️ Requirements

• A minimum of 8 years in building production software, with at least 3 years of direct management experience with engineers; you should have led a team of four or more.

• A proven history of meeting deadlines on projects you managed, along with a clear account of a missed deadline and the steps you took in response.

• You should remain technically active: having written and deployed production code within the last year, and being capable of reviewing pull requests to identify issues.

• Experience with agent systems in production, not just prototypes: including orchestration loops, graphs, multi-step tool use, multi-agent patterns, RAG over actual data, and evaluations you have conducted.

• Your primary method of building should involve coding agents; familiarity with tools like Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or similar, with a recent instance of delivering work 3–5 times faster using these tools.

• Proficiency across the technology stack: Python, modern JavaScript/TypeScript, SQL, REST/GraphQL, and cloud deployment (preferably AWS).

• A well-informed judgment on build-vs-adopt scenarios: being knowledgeable enough in the open-source AI ecosystem to select robust community projects instead of creating solutions from scratch.

• Strong communication skills: you escalate issues early in writing, ensuring your stakeholders are consistently informed about the status of projects.

• Preferred qualifications include experience with knowledge graphs, entity resolution, or unified data layers designed for machine consumption.

• Background in fintech, lending, payments, or other regulated data environments is advantageous.

• Familiarity with Salesforce APIs, Snowflake, or experience transitioning from a CRM-as-application architecture.

• Contributions to open-source AI initiatives are a plus.

• Experience serving as the most senior technical leader in a small organization.

🏝️ Benefits

• Performance bonus of up to 30% of base salary, linked to delivery and business outcomes.

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance coverage.

• 401(k) retirement plan.

• Flexible paid time off and observed holidays.

• Remote-first work environment, with support for your home office setup.

• Direct access to leadership and engagement with critical issues.