Head of Engineering

About Us

We build a customer-facing fintech platform serving active traders and investors. Our product combines real-time market charting with a suite of proprietary analysis tools and metrics developed over decades of professional market experience. Our users depend on the platform during live market hours, which means reliability, performance, and data quality are vital.

We're a small, fully remote engineering team. That means the person in this role has outsized impact: the decisions you make will directly shape the product, the codebase, and the engineering culture.

The Role

This is a player-coach leadership role - you'll be the most senior engineering voice in the company, and you'll still ship code. You'll own technical direction, run the team's prioritization process, and lead a small team of talented developers, while spending a meaningful portion of your week hands-on in the codebase.

You'll work directly with our founder, who is deeply involved in the product and brings strong, fast-moving opinions about what it should do. A core part of this job is translating that high-energy executive input into a stable, clearly prioritized roadmap - and holding that roadmap steady so your team can focus and ship. You should be someone who communicates with confidence, holds priorities firmly under pressure, and sees protecting your team's focus as a core responsibility of leadership.

You'll onboard alongside the platform's original architect, with structured knowledge transfer across the codebase and infrastructure.

What You'll Do

• Own technical direction. Set architecture and engineering standards across the platform, and make the calls on build-vs-refactor, technical debt, and system design.
• Lead prioritization. Run a structured, recurring prioritization process with the founder. Turn shifting business input into a written, ranked plan the team can execute against - and defend it.
• Manage a small team. Lead 3-5 developers with regular 1:1s, clear expectations, and honest, supportive feedback. Create an environment where fast, high-quality work is recognized and rewarded.
• Stay hands-on. Spend roughly 40–60% of your time writing and reviewing code - you'll take on meaty technical work yourself, not just delegate it.
• Own real-time reliability. Our real-time data infrastructure is business-critical during market hours. You'll oversee its performance and evolution, including an in-progress port of our real-time server from Python to Go.
• Own delivery. Run lightweight, effective processes (we use Slack, Linear and GitHub) that keep work visible and moving without drowning a small team in ceremony.

What We're Looking For

Must-haves:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years in a lead, staff, or management role where you were accountable for both technical outcomes and people
• Strong Python backend expertise - we run Django/DRF for our core APIs and FastAPI for async services
• Experience building and operating real-time systems (WebSockets, Socket.IO, streaming data, or similar) at high-volume
• Solid PostgreSQL experience - schema design and efficient ETL design
• Demonstrated ability to prioritize and communicate clearly in a fast-moving environment with a highly engaged executive stakeholder
• Comfortable being the final decision-maker on engineering questions - and comfortable saying "no, not yet" when that's the right answer
• Availability during and around US stock market hours (8:30 AM – 4:30 PM ET)

Nice-to-haves:

• Go experience (we're actively porting performance-critical real-time services to Go)
• Vue familiarity, or enough frontend fluency to review and guide frontend work credibly
• Fintech, trading, or market-data experience

Who Will Thrive Here

• You've worked closely with founders or executives who move fast and feel strongly, and you know how to channel that energy productively rather than absorb it passively
• You'd rather lead a small team where your decisions matter than manage layers of process at a big company
• You take genuine pride in making the people around you more effective
• You're calm under pressure - including live-production, markets-are-open pressure