Senior Engineering Manager

About Scapia

Scapia is a fintech company building a travel-focused credit card experience that converts everyday spending into travel rewards. We deliver seamless financial products and travel experiences through cutting-edge technology and customer-centric innovation, and we're building a high-performance engineering team that thrives on ownership, speed, and solving complex fintech challenges.

Role Overview

We're hiring an Engineering Manager to own one of our most critical product domains — a complex, regulated, high-stakes backend that sits at the heart of our fintech platform. Reliability, correctness, and scale all matter equally here, and your engineering decisions have direct business consequences. You'll join at an inflection point: a working product with real traction, and a next chapter about building the engineering foundations to grow 10x without breaking.

What you'll own

You'll lead a team of 5–10 backend engineers, with scope to grow — deeply involved in technical direction, hiring, and making the team measurably better every quarter.

• Team leadership: Run a tight, high-trust engineering squad; set the bar for code quality, system reliability, and engineering culture
• Technical direction: Own architecture decisions across your domain — APIs, service design, data flows, third-party integrations; hands-on enough to review designs and challenge tradeoffs
• Hiring and growth: Own the full hiring funnel — sourcing, bar-raising, onboarding; develop senior engineers into tech leads
• Reliability and observability: Drive SLA discipline; own uptime, on-call health, incident response, and RCA process
• Cross-functional collaboration: Partner with Product, Risk, Compliance, and external partners; translate real fintech constraints into clean technical solutions
• Process and velocity: Add the right amount of structure without losing startup speed; no dedicated QA team — you and the team own shipping quality to production, with regression suites critical to stability
• AI-first SDLC culture: Leverage AI across the software development lifecycle to boost productivity, innovation, and code quality

The Real Challenge

• Multi-vendor orchestration: the same user journeys run across multiple external partners with different APIs, SLAs, and failure modes
• Regulated complexity: compliance-mandated flows, deduplication, and third-party verification — correct and auditable under regulatory scrutiny
• Stateful, complex workflows: many states, retry logic, and idempotency requirements — resilient and testable while new flows keep being added
• Scale without rewrite: 10x the load through thoughtful incremental improvements, not big-bang migrations

Must-haves

• 3+ years managing backend engineering teams directly — you've hired, grown, and had hard conversations with engineers
• Strong backend engineering depth — you can read a distributed systems design and find the flaw
• Track record of improving team reliability and delivery, not just shipping features
• Comfortable with ambiguity — bring structure rather than wait for it

Nice-to-have: fintech, payments, or regulated financial products experience; AWS / cloud-native infrastructure (our stack runs on ECS); prior startup experience.