Senior Vice President of Engineering

The Opportunity

We’re looking for a Senior Vice President of Engineering to lead Koalafi’s entire engineering organization, including our Consumer and Merchant Experience, Core Engineering, and Application Experience groups, as well as our Data & AI Platform and Architecture functions.

Reporting to the Chief Product and Technology Officer, you will partner closely with the CPTO and Head of Product to set engineering direction, translate company priorities into execution, and build an organization that delivers meaningful business results. Your scope spans the platforms, applications, services, and data infrastructure that power our customer experiences, merchant relationships, and internal operations.

This is a company leadership role, not solely an engineering leadership role. You will help shape business decisions, influence across functions, and bring a clear perspective on how technology can support growth, improve efficiency, and strengthen the customer experience. You must be equally credible in a technical discussion with engineers and a strategic discussion with the executive team or the board—and move comfortably between those two modes.

We’re also looking for an active AI practitioner who will help evolve how Koalafi works. You should be building and experimenting with AI tools yourself, with a thoughtful perspective on how to apply them across engineering and the broader business. The goal is not simply to increase adoption of tools or token usage, but to drive real, measurable business outcomes by embracing a willingness to fundamentally change how the business operates. You will lead this transformation through practical application, sound judgment, and measurable results.

What You’ll Do

Set engineering direction and own execution

Partner with the CPTO, Head of Product, and cross-functional leaders to translate company objectives into a clear engineering strategy, investment priorities, and execution plans. Ensure teams understand the outcomes they are accountable for, make realistic commitments, and surface risks and tradeoffs early. Own the engineering response when delivery is at risk, aligning leaders on corrective action and following through.

Lead as a business executive

Build strong partnerships across Product, Risk, Operations, Finance, Sales, and other functions. Contribute to company decisions beyond engineering, connecting technical choices to growth, customer experience, operating efficiency, and risk. Communicate complex topics clearly and bring well-vetted recommendations – not simply issues or requests – to executive discussions.

Apply technical depth with sound leadership judgment

Earn the team’s trust through technical expertise, thoughtful questions, and the ability to engage deeply in consequential architectural and engineering decisions. Recognize when an initiative, technical risk, or team challenge needs your direct involvement, and engage early enough to make a difference. Balance that involvement with clear delegation, strengthening your leaders’ ownership rather than becoming a bottleneck or doing their jobs for them.

Build and develop a strong leadership team

Lead, coach, and hold accountable engineering leaders and managers across the organization. Set clear expectations for their technical judgment, business understanding, people leadership, and execution. Invest in succession planning, leadership development, and hiring, while addressing performance gaps directly. Continually evaluate team structure, responsibilities, and leadership capacity so the organization can operate effectively as priorities evolve.

Own architecture, data foundations, and pragmatic modernization

Guide the evolution of our applications, core services, and data platforms, balancing near-term delivery with long-term maintainability, reliability, and scale. Modernize the tech stack where it creates clear business value and be able to defend the ROI. Partner with Risk, Analytics, and Data Science to ensure our data engineering and AI foundations support reliable access, clear ownership, and effective use of data across the company.

Drive engineering excellence and responsible investment

Strengthen quality, test automation, delivery practices, observability, and operational readiness. Establish useful measures of delivery effectiveness, reliability, cost, and business impact, and use them to guide improvement. Own engineering budget and capacity planning in partnership with the CPTO and Finance, challenging staffing and technology proposals against business needs and credible alternatives. Partner closely with IT and Information Security to build and operate secure, resilient systems.

Lead AI adoption through hands-on practice

Maintain an active practice of building, prototyping, and experimenting with AI tools yourself. Use that experience to help teams improve how they design, build, test, deploy, and operate software—not just how they write code. Stay current with emerging capabilities, distinguish useful advances from hype, and turn promising experiments into repeatable practices with measurable improvements in speed, quality, or capacity, with the ultimate goal being to drive better business outcomes for the company.

Help the broader company work more effectively through AI

Partner with business leaders to identify where generative AI, automation, and better internal tools can improve workflows and outcomes. Help teams move from ideas and pilots to solutions people actually use. Ensure adoption is supported by appropriate data access, technical foundations, training, and safeguards, in partnership with Information Security, Risk, and Legal and Compliance.

About You

• An experienced engineering executive. You bring 15+ years of progressive engineering experience, including substantial experience leading managers and senior engineering leaders across multiple teams. You have owned organization-wide strategy, delivery, talent, and investment decisions, not just an individual product or technical function.

• Technically credible and comfortable going deep. You have strong architectural judgment across complex applications, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and data platforms. You can challenge assumptions, assess tradeoffs, and help teams work through difficult technical decisions without needing to be the expert in every technology.

• Business-minded and influential across functions. You understand how engineering decisions affect revenue, cost, customer experience, and risk. You can earn the confidence of executive peers, navigate competing priorities, and build alignment without relying on reporting lines or authority.

• A leader with strong situational judgment. You know when to delegate, when to coach, when to challenge, and when to get directly involved. You maintain enough visibility to recognize emerging problems and take ownership before they become escalations, without micromanaging your team.

• A committed developer of leaders. You have a track record of building inclusive, high-performing organizations and helping managers become stronger leaders. You set a high bar, provide candid feedback, address difficult people decisions, and create clear accountability.

• An active AI practitioner. You can point to things you have personally built, workflows you have redesigned, or experiments you have run using AI tools. You have informed views on their capabilities and limitations, and experience helping others apply them effectively. Your interest extends beyond coding productivity to how AI can improve the way an entire company operates.

• Pragmatic and accountable for outcomes. You can balance modernization with delivery, speed with reliability, and ambition with available capacity. You communicate clearly, make decisions with imperfect information, and follow through on commitments.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in fintech, payments, lending, or other regulated, transaction-intensive environments is a plus, as is experience with customer- and merchant-facing products, servicing platforms, and internal business systems such as Salesforce.

• Familiarity with technologies in our environment—including Go, Node.js, React, AWS, Kubernetes, and native iOS and Android development—is helpful. We value strong engineering fundamentals and architectural judgment over expertise in any single stack.

• Fluency in the modern AI stack and in how it is changing the way software is built. That includes frontier models, coding agents, and the harnesses, evaluations, and guardrails that make them reliable in production. You should understand how the developer workflow is shifting from writing code to designing and supervising agentic loops, where agents plan, build, test, and verify work against clear specifications. We standardize on Claude, but regularly evaluate new frontier models and tools, and knowing which advances actually matter, is a core part of the job.

• Bachelors degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Location: Richmond, VA; Arlington, VA; or Remote (U.S.). Associates near one of our office locations may work in-office, hybrid, or remotely. Remote opportunities are available to candidates throughout the United States. 

Salary Range: $275,000-$325,000 per year (depending on experience and location)

Additional Compensation: This position will be eligible to participate in company bonus plan. 

The final salary offer will depend on factors including, but not limited to, experience, skills, and geographic location. The actual annualized salary amount offered to any candidate at the time of hire will be reflected solely in the candidate’s offer letter.

Applications will be accepted until position is filled.