ABOUT ASTRA Astra is a high-impact engineering team building mission-critical financial infrastructure. Our fintech platform powers payment processing, fraud detection, and financial compliance for businesses handling 100M+ in weekly transaction volume. We maintain 99.9%+ uptime, process complex cross-border payments, and coordinate with multiple third-party financial services while meeting strict regulatory requirements. THE ROLE We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead and grow a team of backend engineers building the systems that power our fintech platform. This is a player-coach role, your primary job is team leadership, delivery, and people development, with enough hands-on technical involvement to stay credible in design discussions and step in when it counts. You'll own the health of your team's execution, from sprint planning to career growth to hiring, while partnering with senior engineers on the architecture decisions that shape payments, fraud detection, compliance, and user management across our distributed systems. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Lead and Develop Your Team: Manage a team of backend engineers, running a rigorous delivery process, conducting regular 1:1s, and supporting career growth across all levels of the team. - Manage Delivery: Own sprint planning, milestone tracking, and velocity. Catch slipping projects early, remove blockers, and balance technical quality with business speed so the team ships reliably. - Hire and Grow Talent: Own hiring for your team, from screening through onboarding, and build the structures (leveling, mentorship, promotion paths) that help engineers grow. - Build Engineering Culture: Establish the norms, standards, and practices, code review, on-call, planning cadence, that define how your team works day to day. - Partner Across the Organization: Work closely with product, compliance, and other engineering teams to translate business and regulatory needs into a clear execution plan for your team. - Guide Technical Direction: Weigh in on architecture decisions for payment processing, fraud detection, and compliance systems, and make sure your team is set up to make sound technical tradeoffs without you in every decision. - Stay Hands-On: Spend a meaningful chunk of your time in the codebase, code review, design review, and picking up complex work directly, especially where it unblocks the team or where your experience adds the most leverage. This is not a purely managerial role, but management and delivery come first. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR REQUIREMENTS - 2+ years of experience leading an engineering team, including performance management, hiring, and career development, this is the core of the role - 5+ years of overall software engineering experience, with enough recent hands-on depth to stay credible in technical discussions and contribute directly when needed - Demonstrated ability to run a delivery process: sprint planning, milestone tracking, and catching problems before they become fire drills - Experience as a player-coach, comfortable spending most of your time on people and delivery while still being able to step into technical work - Ability and willingness to travel up to ~15% annually EDUCATION - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field required - Master's degree in Computer Science or Engineering from an accredited university highly preferred TECHNICAL SKILLS - Backend Development: Python (we use Python 3), solid understanding of web frameworks and APIs - Database Design: Familiarity with both NoSQL and SQL databases - Cloud Infrastructure: Google Cloud Platform or similar - Architecture Patterns: Working familiarity with domain-driven design, clean architecture, and event-driven/microservices patterns, enough to guide and evaluate decisions your team makes LEADERSHIP SKILLS - Strong track record running 1:1s, performance conversations, and team structure decisions - Data-driven approach to delivery: tracks velocity, cycle time, or similar, not purely gut-feel - Experience integrating into an existing team and earning trust with engineers who didn't choose you - Experience scaling a team through a size transition (e.g., 8 to 15-20), including what structurally needs to change - Strong communicator who can translate technical tradeoffs for non-technical stakeholders - Comfortable navigating ambiguity and making decisions with incomplete information PREFERRED EXPERIENCE - Financial Systems: Payment processing, fraud detection, or compliance systems - Financial Regulations: Understanding of AML, KYC, PCI DSS, or similar regulatory frameworks - Banking Integrations: Experience with financial APIs and money movement systems - High-Scale Systems: Experience with systems processing high transaction volumes - Third-Party Integrations: Experience coordinating multiple external service integrations WHY THIS ROLE MATTERS - Direct Impact: You'll lead a core part of a small engineering team building systems that power a growing fintech platform - Team Building: Shape the people, practices, and culture that will carry this team through its next stage of growth - Delivery Ownership: Your rigor around planning and execution directly determines how reliably we ship - Technical Involvement: Stay close enough to the code and architecture to make informed calls and jump in when it matters - Financial Innovation: Build and lead the team building systems that enable new financial products and services WHAT WE OFFER - Competitive compensation with equity in a growing fintech company - Remote-first culture with flexible working arrangements - Small team, big impact, your leadership directly shapes our platform and our people - Professional growth, lead a team through a real scaling stage and grow with it - Modern tech stack, work with cutting-edge cloud technologies - Mission-driven, build systems that power f