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Imprint is a fintech company that modernizes co-branded credit cards and payments infrastructure for major brands like Crate & Barrel, Rakuten, Booking.com, H-E-B, Fetch, and Shell. The company combines advanced payments infrastructure, intelligent underwriting, and customer data to create personalized financial experiences without requiring partners to become banks. Backed by top-tier VCs including Kleiner Perkins, Thrive Capital, Ribbit, and Khosla Ventures, Imprint is addressing a $300+ billion annual spend market still dominated by legacy systems.
The Risk Engineering team owns the real-time systems that execute Imprint's risk decisions: transaction authorization and fraud scoring on every card swipe, the underwriting pipeline evaluating every application, and vendor integrations powering both. These are latency-sensitive, high-stakes distributed systems with competing stakeholder demands. As Senior Engineering Manager, you will own three core areas:
1. Real-time authorization and fraud decisioning: Every card swipe runs through systems your team builds, with decisions in milliseconds. Failures are immediately visible, and wrong answers cost real money—either fraud losses or declined good customers. You set the design, testing, and operational standards.
2. Underwriting pipeline: You own the pipeline spanning credit, fraud, identity, and compliance checks. As Imprint launches new brand partners and products, the pipeline must absorb new policies and data sources without becoming brittle.
3. Vendor strategy and integration: You evaluate fraud scoring, identity verification, and bureau data vendors; weigh build-versus-buy decisions with real latency and cost data; and push back on approaches that won't survive production load.
You will prioritize across a wide cross-functional surface area (Credit, Fraud, Product, Compliance) competing for engineering capacity. You bring clarity to poorly-scoped platform problems, decide what the team takes on, and make reasoning legible to stakeholders. You define the roadmap and scope work yourself with no organizational abstraction layers.
Leadership approach emphasizes technical credibility amplified by modern AI tools. You don't need to be on the critical path writing code, but you need strong technical judgment on latency-sensitive distributed systems design trade-offs and modern tools to exercise it. You inherit a strong, psychologically safe team of senior engineers and your job is to keep it that way while raising the ceiling: hand ICs ownership of entire domains, hold the bar on work scoping and delivery, and give feedback that changes outcomes.
The backend stack includes Go, MySQL, DynamoDB, Temporal, Kafka, Kubernetes, and AWS.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of engineering management experience with a track record of building, developing, and retaining strong engineering teams
- Experience managing through periods of rapid growth, ambiguity, or significant technical change, with teams emerging stronger
- Strong technical foundation: were a strong engineer before management and have maintained technical credibility through hands-on engagement or modern AI tools
- Experience managing Staff-level ICs and helping senior engineers grow into bigger roles
- Owned latency-sensitive, high-availability distributed systems in production where wrong decisions cost real dollars
- Clear communication in writing, 1:1s, executive rooms, and with engineers
- Drive delivery through your team, not around them; know how to scope work, set priorities, and create conditions for engineers to do their best work
- Experience using AI tools to stay close to technical work (investigating codebases, assessing feasibility, clarifying asks), or genuine enthusiasm to adopt them
- Experience in risk, fraud, underwriting, or payments is a plus
