Senior Engineering Manager

The Role

Step is looking for an experienced Senior Engineering Manager to lead and grow a high-performing engineering team building products used by millions of customers.

As a Senior Engineering Manager, you'll combine strong technical judgment with people leadership to help Step move quickly without compromising quality. You'll work closely with Product, Design, Data, Risk, Operations, and other engineering leaders to turn ambitious product goals into reliable, scalable systems and exceptional customer experiences.

You'll have broad impact across Step's mobile, web, backend, and machine learning platforms, while helping establish the technical strategy, engineering practices, and team culture that enable us to scale.

What You'll Do

• Lead and grow engineering teams: Build, mentor, and retain a world-class team of engineers, creating an environment where people can do their best work and grow their careers.
• Own execution: Partner with Product and Design to translate company and product priorities into clear engineering plans, balancing speed, quality, and technical investment.
• Set technical direction: Guide architecture and technical strategy across backend, mobile, web, data, and ML systems, making pragmatic decisions that support Step's growth.
• Deliver end-to-end: Ensure teams own features throughout their life cycle, from technical discovery and planning through production, measurement, and iteration.
• Raise the engineering bar: Establish strong practices around code quality, testing, observability, reliability, security, and operational excellence.
• Build for scale: Help evolve Step's technology platform to support rapidly growing customers, products, and transaction volumes while maintaining a fast development cadence.
• Stay technically engaged: Contribute to architecture discussions, design reviews, incident response, and complex technical decisions without becoming a bottleneck for the team.
• Develop engineering leaders: Coach senior and staff-level engineers and help create a strong pipeline of technical leadership across the organization.
• Partner cross-functionally: Work closely with Product, Design, Data Science, Risk/Fraud, Operations, and Growth to solve complex problems and deliver meaningful customer outcomes.
• Move with urgency: Help the team make thoughtful decisions quickly, remove obstacles, and continuously improve how we build and ship software.
• Champion the customer: Keep the needs of Step's customers at the center of technical and product decisions, particularly as we build financial products for the next generation.

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience leading engineering teams.
• Proven experience as an Engineering Manager, Senior Engineering Manager, or equivalent engineering leadership role.
• Strong Computer Science and software engineering fundamentals.
• Experience building and operating scalable, reliable production systems.
• Demonstrated ability to lead engineers across multiple disciplines, such as backend, mobile, web, data, or ML.
• Strong technical judgment and the ability to make architectural decisions in complex, distributed systems.
• Track record of delivering products from inception through production in a fast-moving environment.
• Experience hiring, mentoring, developing, and retaining high-performing engineering teams.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Strong product sense and an ability to connect technical decisions to customer and business outcomes.
• Passion for software quality, operational excellence, and continuous improvement.
• Ability to balance long-term technical strategy with the urgency of a rapidly evolving business.

Nice to Have

• Experience building consumer financial products, fintech, banking, lending, payments, risk, or fraud systems.
• Experience operating highly scalable distributed systems and cloud infrastructure.
• Experience with mobile-first consumer products.
• Experience working with machine learning, data science, or real-time risk and fraud systems.
• Experience in a high-growth startup or similarly fast-paced environment.
• Experience leading teams through significant organizational or product growth.
• Familiarity with technologies such as Kotlin, React Native, TypeScript, Python, gRPC, Protocol Buffers, Postgres, BigQuery, Kubernetes, and Terraform.