Director of Engineering

Overall purpose

The Director of Engineering will own CTNA’s engineering architecture, technical standards, delivery governance, vendor execution quality, secure SDLC, release-readiness criteria, and production operations across the mobile wallet, backend services, AWS platform, and partner-delivered components.

This is an engineering ownership role, not a product-management role. You will partner closely with CTNA’s CTO/CISO on product direction and prioritization, while serving as the accountable engineering owner for how the product is designed, built, reviewed, released, operated, and evidenced.

You should be comfortable reviewing backend architecture, APIs, cloud infrastructure, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, logs, alerts, mobile release readiness, and vendor deliverables. You do not need to be the primary React Native developer, but you must be able to hold mobile, backend, and platform engineering partners accountable for high-quality implementation.

This is not initially a large people-management role. In the early phase, you will lead through technical ownership, architecture review, partner governance, delivery standards, and direct hands-on technical judgment. As CTNA scales, you may help define, hire, and lead additional engineering, platform, DevOps, SRE, or infrastructure capacity.

What you’ll do

● Own CTNA’s full-stack engineering architecture across mobile wallet, backend services, AWS infrastructure, admin/operations tooling, and partner-delivered components.

● Partner with the CTO/CISO to translate product direction, regulatory-readiness requirements, and business priorities into clear engineering execution plans.

● Define engineering standards for API design, backend services, mobile integration, secure SDLC, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, observability, testing, release readiness, and production support.

● Oversee mobile wallet engineering outcomes, including React Native / TypeScript delivery quality, secure API integration, app signing, environment configuration, crash reporting, telemetry, release workflows, and iOS/Android production readiness.

● Own backend and platform architecture for regulated transaction workflows, account services, compliance-state integration, reconciliation, internal admin tooling, audit logging, and partner integrations.

● Govern CTNA’s AWS cloud foundation, including environment separation, IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager, logging, monitoring, backup/restore, networking, security baselines, and cost/operational controls.

● Define and enforce infrastructure-as-code standards, preferably Terraform, so infrastructure is version-controlled, reviewable, reusable, auditable, and consistent across environments.

● Build and operate secure CI/CD and release-governance practices, including branch protection, approval gates, scanning, artifact controls, rollback procedures, deployment evidence, and production-release guardrails.

● Establish observability across logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, alerts, security-event feeds, incident workflows, and operational health checks.

● Define incident severity levels, escalation paths, on-call workflows, post-incident reviews, runbooks, corrective-action tracking, and disaster-recovery expectations.

● Translate approved security, risk, and regulatory-readiness expectations into practical engineering, infrastructure, and operational controls.

● Build repeatable evidence collection for access reviews, change approvals, deployment logs, cloud-control findings, vulnerability remediation, backup/restore tests, DR exercises, incident records, and vendor-control artifacts.

● Lead technical oversight of specialized engineering and platform partners, including architecture review, acceptance criteria, delivery-quality review, release-readiness assessment, and risk escalation.

● Keep CTNA leadership informed of technical progress, delivery risks, production-readiness gaps, and material tradeoffs.

What you’ll bring

● 10+ years of software engineering, backend engineering, platform engineering, cloud engineering, DevOps, SRE, or infrastructure engineering experience.

● 5+ years of technical leadership experience owning architecture, delivery standards, production systems, engineering quality, or partner-led engineering execution.

● Strong backend, cloud, and platform engineering depth, including APIs, distributed systems, secure service design, data flows, observability, reliability, and production operations.

● Strong AWS experience, including cloud networking, IAM, KMS, Secrets Manager, logging, monitoring, managed databases, backup/restore, and cloud-security services.

● Strong infrastructure-as-code experience, preferably Terraform, with the ability to define standards and review partner-delivered infrastructure.

● Deep CI/CD and secure SDLC experience, including protected environments, approvals, artifact control, scanning, secrets handling, rollback procedures, and auditable change management.

● Experience operating or overseeing mission-critical production systems with clear expectations for uptime, incident response, monitoring, runbooks, postmortems, and operational reviews.

● Comfort operates in regulated, audit-sensitive, or high-security environments, including control documentation, evidence collection, access reviews, change control, disaster recovery testing, and audit or examination support.

● Experience governing internal and external engineering contributors, including delivery standards, architecture review, vendor acceptance criteria, issue escalation, and production-readiness review.

● Strong executive communication skills, with the ability to explain engineering risk, architecture decisions, vendor dependencies, and control gaps to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

● Hands-on technical judgment: able to review APIs, cloud architecture, Terraform, IAM policies, CI/CD pipelines, observability, mobile release readiness, and partner deliverables directly.

Preferred qualifications

● Experience in fintech, banking, payments, trust company operations, regulated SaaS, high-security SaaS, or financial infrastructure.

● Experience with digital assets, stablecoins, custody, wallets, blockchain infrastructure, settlement, reconciliation, or real-time transaction-processing systems.

● Experience overseeing React Native / TypeScript mobile applications, iOS/Android release processes, app signing, crash reporting, telemetry, mobile security controls, or mobile wallet UX.

● Familiarity with OCC examination readiness, FFIEC guidance, NIST, SOC 2, GLBA, BSA/AML-adjacent systems, or bank-grade operational controls.

● Production experience with ECS/Fargate, Lambda, Aurora PostgreSQL, API Gateway, EventBridge, SQS/SNS, S3 Object Lock, AWS Backup, CloudWatch, X-Ray, OpenTelemetry, and related AWS services.

● Experience with SIEM/MDR integrations, vulnerability management, threat detection, security incident response, or cloud security engineering.

● Experience working with external engineering vendors, infrastructure partners, custody providers, compliance platforms, or other critical third-party technology providers.

● AWS certifications such as Solutions Architect, DevOps Engineer, Security Specialty, or equivalent practical experience.

Pay: $140,000.00 - $220,000.00 per year

Benefits:

• Dental insurance
• Flexible schedule
• Health insurance
• Paid time off
• Professional development assistance
• Vision insurance

Work Location: Remote