Engineering Manager (Java) at Strivo Labs

About the Role

• We are seeking a highly technical and business-oriented Engineering Manager with deep expertise in Java and strong experience building scalable, secure financial systems.
• The ideal candidate will combine hands-on architectural leadership with people management excellence to drive the design, development, and optimization of mission-critical fintech products.
• This role requires a leader who understands high-availability systems, payment integrations, regulatory requirements, and distributed architecture — while also building and mentoring high-performing engineering teams.

Key Responsibilities
Technical Leadership:

• Lead architecture and development of scalable, secure, and high-performance fintech applications using Java (Spring Boot, Hibernate, Microservices).
• Design and review system architecture for payment processing, digital wallets, lending platforms, or core banking integrations.
• Ensure high availability, fault tolerance, and system resilience.
• Drive best practices in clean code, testing, CI/CD, and DevOps automation.
• Oversee database design and optimization (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, etc.).
• Implement security best practices, including encryption, authentication (OAuth2, JWT), and regulatory compliance.

Engineering Management:

• Lead, mentor, and scale a team of backend and full-stack engineers.
• Conduct code reviews and enforce engineering standards.
• Collaborate with Product, Compliance, Risk, and Operations teams.
• Drive sprint planning, backlog grooming, and delivery tracking.
• Build a performance-driven engineering culture.

Fintech & Compliance Expertise:

• Work with APIs for payments, banking integrations, KYC/AML systems.
• Ensure systems comply with financial regulations and data protection standards.
• Manage integrations with third-party financial service providers.
• Maintain audit-ready documentation and system traceability.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• 7 - 10+ years of software engineering experience.
• 3–5+ years in an Engineering Lead/Manager capacity.
• Strong proficiency in Java (8+), Spring Boot, RESTful APIs.
• Experience building microservices architecture.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems and event-driven architecture (Kafka, RabbitMQ).
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Deep understanding of fintech/payment systems is highly preferred.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Strong database design and performance optimization skills.

Preferred Experience:

• Experience working in fintech, banking, digital lending, or payment platforms.
• Exposure to PCI-DSS or other financial compliance standards.
• Knowledge of blockchain or digital assets is a plus.
• Experience scaling systems to handle high transaction volumes.

Core Competencies:

• Strategic thinking
• Strong architectural judgment
• Stakeholder management
• Excellent communication skills
• Decision-making under pressure
• High ownership and accountability

What Success Looks Like:

• Stable, secure, and scalable financial systems
• High-performing engineering team
• On-time product delivery
• Improved system uptime and performance
• Reduced technical debt.