Director of Engineering

Cardiff

Director of Engineering leading software development and team at Cardiff. Overseeing engineering department with a focus on production and performance delivery.

Posted 8/1/2026full-timeRemote • 🇺🇸 United StatesLead💰 $180,000 per yearWebsite

Core Competencies

Role fit

Core Competencies

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Demonstrates extensive experience in managing engineering teams and delivering production software, with a strong technical background in coding and system architecture. Proficient in cross-department collaboration, vendor management, and ensuring production quality and security.

Highest-signal resume keywords

Team ManagementProduction Software DevelopmentPython ProgrammingSalesforce API IntegrationCloud Deployment (AWS)

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills

Production Software DevelopmentPython ProgrammingModern JavaScript/TypeScriptSQLREST/GraphQLAgent Systems DevelopmentKnowledge GraphsEntity ResolutionOpen-Source AI ContributionsBuild-Vs-Adopt Judgment

Soft Skills

Communication DisciplineStakeholder ManagementPerformance ManagementTeam Leadership

Tools & Technologies

SalesforceSnowflakeCloud InfrastructureCardiff APIFundingo

Industry Keywords

FintechLendingPaymentsRegulated Data Environment

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSCloudGraphQLJavaScriptPythonSQLTypeScript

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

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

What you’ll need

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

Comp & perks

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