Engineering Manager, Payments

Qualia•Austin, TX

3h•Hybrid

About The Position

We are hiring an entrepreneurial hands-on Engineering Manager to lead Qualia’s Payments team. This is a builder/player/coach role, and you won’t just run a team - you’ll redesign how a modern Engineering Payments team operates when AI can do the first pass on nearly everything we used to do by hand. As an Engineering Manager, Payments, you've been in the fintech industry for a while and have a proven track record of success. You are comfortable leading complex, high-liability projects. You have experience making key architectural decisions and performing the research to back up those decisions. You've dealt with the consequences of your mistakes, and you know how to fight fires if necessary. You enjoy mentoring and providing support. You've thrived in different environments and realize that each team is unique. Every real estate closing ends with money changing hands: earnest money deposits, loan funding, mortgage payoffs, seller proceeds, and commissions. Qualia powers a substantial portion of U.S. residential home sales every year, totaling billions of dollars in transaction volume. The Payments team builds the systems that move those funds safely, accurately, and on time. Our engineers are entrepreneurial, pragmatic builders who move quickly without cutting corners, and who are as comfortable owning a project end to end as they are collaborating with a team. We ship frequently, as often as multiple times a day, and work directly with design, compliance, and customer-facing teams to build payment experiences our customers depend on.

Requirements

You've taken full ownership of complex, high-liability payment systems in production, and you know how to respond calmly and methodically when funds are on the line
5+ years of experience as a strong full-stack web developer and 2+ years of experience managing a payments engineering team
Direct experience building or maintaining other money-movement systems (banking, fintech, payments processors, or similar regulated environments strongly preferred)
Strong understanding of transactional integrity, idempotency, and failure-mode design in financial systems
Familiarity with payment rails, banking APIs, or financial compliance standards (NACHA, OFAC screening, PCI, SOC 2) is a strong plus
You have made key architectural decisions for large, high-stakes projects
You have mentored junior developers
You have worked on multiple engineering teams, both small and large
Good product sense, strong attention to detail, and a passion for building systems people can trust with their money
Background in enterprise software and fintech preferred

Responsibilities

Serve as a hands-on Engineering Manager (Player/Coach) to build the payments team
Design, build, and maintain systems that process ACH and wire transfers at scale (billions of dollars annually), including origination, settlement, reconciliation, and exception handling
Build and harden payment-processing pipelines that integrate with banking partners, payment rails, and third-party financial APIs
Implement controls for wire fraud prevention, transaction verification, and anomaly detection alongside our security and compliance teams
Improve and extend core web applications (frontend and backend) that support escrow accounting and closing-day money movement
Own architectural decisions for payments infrastructure, including data integrity, idempotency, retry/failure handling, and audit logging
Partner with Compliance, Risk, and Accounting stakeholders to ensure systems meet regulatory and audit requirements (e.g., NACHA rules, wire fraud regulations, SOC 2 controls)