Director of Software Engineering

CommonBond  is the award-winning finance company where people come first. Our approach is no big secret: lower rates, simpler options, and a world-class experience to support you throughout your student loan journey. We also offer a platform that allows businesses to turn student debt relief into a company benefit. Plus, every time we fund a degree we also pay for a child’s education in the developing world through our Social Promise. We are proud to be named to the World's 50 Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company, Time Magazines Top 50 Most Genius Companies, the 50 Best Places to Work by Inc., and the Forbes Fintech 50. We are backed by great investors, have an awesome team, and are looking for our next great team member.  

We are looking for an experienced Software Engineering Director with a consistent record in delivering best-of-breed SAAS software. This role will be responsible for providing technical leadership to our early stage Student Loan Benefits business. This business consists of four emerging products with established user base providing student loan benefits to more than 2M lives. For every person we help with our student loan benefit we donate to Pencils of Promise, building schools for underprivileged children across the world. We want a strong leader with a vision for the future of SAAS technology who can grow and manage a team of exceptional engineers.  

Managing the engineering team, you will work hand in hand with the Product, Design and Business Development teams to help define, design, build, test, and deploy SAAS products and integrate strategic partners into our rapidly evolving product architecture.  You will be responsible for the success of the business and your engineering team.  

As a member of the Product and Technology leadership team, you will have a role in setting policies and standards across the entire product and technology landscape at CommonBond.  

Functions 

* Oversee an agile product development team of 5+ engineers (Agile Coach or Scrum Master experience appreciated) 
* Excellent coding, design and architecture skills. Software that is reliable, testable and maintainable should be what you do by default.  
* Set high standards of technical excellence 
* Balance the product/technology/data trade-offs both in product development and strategic partner integration 
* Work closely with product management and design to understand the user, build products with empathy, and designing technology to drive user value and delight 
* Build strong relationships with other managers and be well respected by other engineers  
* Manage the performance of your team, mentoring them to further their careers. 
* Contribute to the technical and process innovation of the Technology Team. 
* Influence and establish engineering best practices 
* Align cultural, technology and process decisions across the department. 

* Collaborate with other development teams and cross functional groups. 
* Recruit highly talented engineers for CommonBond 
* Conduct post-mortems and retrospectives  
* Demonstrates understanding of our competitive landscape 

 

Desired Qualifications 

* 7+ years of experience, with 1+ years of leadership experience and 1+ Agile scrum master experience.  
* Strong interpersonal & leadership skills.  
* Having programmed in React, Java and/or Go will help you get going faster, but your primary languages aren’t as important as being a great problem solver and engineer. 
* SQL proficiency, particularly with PostgreSQL is a plus. 
* Experience in a cloud environment a plus (we use Kubernetes on AWS) 
* Experience managing integrations with high profile customers  
* Experience with highly scalable micro service development and/or event sourced architectures in a CI/CD environment is a plus. 

* BA/BS or above from a Computer Science program preferred. 
* You should be able to work daily in our office in New York City 

 

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.