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Ethena Labs is building a new engineering team to own Ethena Pay, a neobanking app built on stablecoin infrastructure. You will serve as Engineering Manager / Tech Lead, combining hands-on technical leadership with people management in a player-coach role.
You will spend most of your week writing and shipping production code as one of the team's strongest individual contributors, taking on the most critical work and unblocking team members. You'll own the full architecture—services, money-paths, data model, infrastructure, on-chain settlement—and make design decisions that keep the system correct, legible, and extensible as it scales.
Key responsibilities include:
- Write and ship production code most days, handling the hardest and most critical-path work
- Own the system architecture and hold the entire technical design in your head
- Build and grow the team through rigorous, humane hiring; raise the engineering bar; onboard new engineers with structured plans
- Set and enforce a high engineering bar: non-author code review on money paths, CI required to merge, small PRs, disciplined testing (TDD/BDD as default), automated review, and non-negotiable correctness standards
- Establish safe, effective agentic-development practices as team default
- Own the delivery cadence: run a tight, high-velocity process (sprints or kanban) with predictable versioned releases, healthy backlog, and short lead time from idea to production
- Drive production reliability: real alerting, on-call rotation, tested runbooks, and incident response
This is a rare combination: the scope and autonomy of an early-stage build with the backing, treasury, and distribution of one of the largest stablecoin companies.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Led engineering for a consumer money product (neobank, payments, or crypto money app) where bugs have real financial consequences; owned an engineering function with genuine financial stakes
- Led a small team (~3–8 people) while still shipping code yourself (tech lead, staff, or hands-on engineering manager background)
- Shipped production code within the last year; not a management-ladder-only background
- Owned production operations for a money system (on-call, real incidents, observability, secret/key hygiene); can name incidents you personally drove to resolution
- Owned or overseen integration of regulated third-party financial rails (at least two of): card issuing/BIN-sponsor programs (Marqeta, Lithic, Kulipa, Stripe Issuing), identity/KYC/onboarding (SumSub, Persona, Onfido), banking or fiat on-/off-ramp partners (BaaS or ramp partner), key custody/signing (cloud KMS, HSM, MPC, multisig)
- Run a high-velocity, disciplined delivery process; led teams shipping fast and predictably in agile setups (sprints or kanban, versioned releases, short lead time) without sacrificing quality
- Test-driven and behaviour-driven development as core practice, not box-ticking
- Agent-native: wield agentic development (coding agents like Claude Code, MCP servers, reusable skills) as a core multiplier with a real point of view on safe adoption in money products; fluent, not a dabbler; know failure modes and verify output
- Technical breadth to lead backend, platform, and mobile engineers: deep in backend/distributed systems, genuinely literate across the rest
- Strong TypeScript/Node (or credible senior path from Go/Kotlin/Java); think natively in idempotency, reconciliation, retries, consistency under partial failure, event-driven services, Postgres
- Client-facing APIs & auth: understand app-facing API as a product (versioning, idempotency keys, clean error model), auth backend (OAuth2/OIDC, session lifecycle, WebAuthn/passkeys)
- Platform & reliability: enough Kubernetes, IaC, observability (OTel/Grafana-class) to own deploy/rollback and hold reliability bar; know the difference between a dashboard and an alert that pages
- Native mobile: enough to review native iOS (Swift/SwiftUI) and reason about mobile ↔ backend contracts, failure states, on-device auth
