Engineering Manager, Vendor at Vantaca+HOAi – Redwood City, California

OVERVIEW
Engineering Managers help build an inspiring workplace where talented people are empowered to drive amazing customer experiences and business results. Reporting to the Chief Technology Officer, you will own the engineering vision and execution for HOAi's Vendor product—a platform that streamlines how property management companies pay and manage vendor relationships. You will leverage your deep payments expertise and passion for customer experience to solve critical business problems, set direction for your team, and serve as a key collaborator on business strategy within the product and development organization.
You will influence best Engineering practices through hands-on leadership and help scale our next phase of rapid growth. Specific areas for impact include building and scaling the payments engineering team, architecting reliable and compliant payment processing infrastructure, and providing technical and strategic leadership to evolve our vendor payments product into a marketplace connecting property managers with vetted service providers. You will develop a team of diverse engineers to deliver world-class payments and marketplace experiences that excite and delight customers.
VISION FOR ROLEWe are looking for a dynamic leader and technologist with deep payments domain expertise who pushes boundaries and thinks beyond expectations to inspire a talented team to do the same. This position involves managing a team of 4-8 engineers. This role is a unique chance to build something from the ground up—standing up a vendor payments product today and shaping its evolution into a vendor marketplace that transforms how the property management industry sources and pays for services. You'll need to understand payments infrastructure (processing, reconciliation, ledgering, compliance), marketplace dynamics, and how these products intersect with HOAi's broader AI platform. Working closely with product management and the leadership team, you will be a critical component to accelerating the innovation HOAi is bringing to customers with taste and speed.
RESPONSIBILITIES

• Lead high-impact initiatives that chart the course for our vendor payments platform, from core payment processing to marketplace evolution.
• Focus on talent, process, accountability, and scalability that fuels product velocity and innovation.
• Foster a culture of engineering excellence around payments reliability, security, and compliance within the engineering organization.
• Set objectives for continuous improvement for both products and people, driving the upward trajectory of talent within the team to add value to the business.
• Drive strategic technical initiatives based on customer feedback and needs of the business to ensure the continued scalability, reliability, and compliance of HOAi's vendor payments platform, including payment processing, reconciliation, and vendor onboarding.
• Through collaboration, influence a joint roadmap including prioritization & resource allocation by managing priorities & decisions based on factors such as technical capabilities, customer/partner/market requests, build-vs-buy-vs-partner, and competitive landscape.
• Build strong relations between the technology team and external stakeholders and customers to deliver market driven services.
• Drive quality initiatives and strategies to ensure our services exceed the expectations of customers by partnering with Customer Experience team to understand support challenges and drive product improvements to reduce support load.
• Shape and nurture a culture of execution, velocity, innovation, excellence, ingenuity, and ownership as HOAi continues to scale.
• Facilitate stand-ups and retrospectives, documenting feedback and implementing improvements.
• Lead technical refinement sessions to ensure clarity and alignment on project goals and work with engineers to break down projects into manageable, deliverable tasks.
• Review backlog items to ensure they meet the Definition of Ready prior to sprint planning and ensure Definition of Done is being met.
• Provide constructive feedback during code reviews, architecture discussions, and other technical documents to support informed decision making.
• Set strategic goals and oversee the deployment of large-scale initiatives, fostering a data-driven culture to enhance efficiency, scalability, stability, and security.
• Monitor test metrics, ensuring code coverage and success rates meet established standards.
• Conduct one-on-one meetings with direct reports to support their career growth and development.
• Mentor and guide software engineering professionals, helping them navigate career progression and professional development.
• Drive or contribute to significant process and workflow improvements within the team and the broader development organization.
• Assist in creating technical roadmaps that prioritize short-term goals while aligning with overall strategic objectives, anticipating risks, and iterating towards targets.
• Collaborate with product and design teams to prepare and plan future initiatives.

QUALIFICATIONS

• B.S. / M.S. degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline
• 8+ years of experience in software engineering with a strong focus on payments, fintech, or financial services product technologies
• 3+ years in a managerial position leading / managing software engineering teams
• Proven experience working in a rapidly evolving growth environment, working on multiple products concurrently
• Strong leadership skills, capable of providing real-time coaching/creating actionable development plans and promoting a culture that keeps people motivated and happy
• Proven experience building and operating payment processing systems, including familiarity with payment rails, ledgering, reconciliation, and PCI compliance
• Ability to own and manage multiple concurrent projects, including presenting and negotiating with stakeholders on the interdependencies and possibilities of what can realistically be delivered
• Excellent stakeholder management, prioritization skills, and agile delivery through chaos and fast-paced environments
• Experience working with product managers to ensure planning and prioritization of key projects, inspiring the engineering team to achieve challenging and high-performance goals and timelines
• Experience with marketplace platforms, vendor onboarding systems, or multi-sided platform dynamics is a strong plus
• Experience designing, building, and optimizing scalable financial systems that support rapid transaction volume growth while maintaining data integrity and audibility

CORE VALUES

• Always Growing: Likes change and enjoys finding new ways to improve their knowledge and the product. Always ready to learn quickly, helping themselves and the team grow.
• Win as a Team: Builds trust and works together by making sure everyone communicates well. Actively involved in daily work, working closely with the team, listening to their ideas, and celebrating successes together.
• Accountability Starts with Me: Notices problems and takes personal action to solve them.
• Unwavering Commitment to Customer Experience: Regularly talks to customers, taking personal responsibility to understand what they need, address concerns, and make their experience better with improved Vantaca processes.
• Innovate Boldly: We challenge the status quo and push boundaries to create meaningful change. We act with urgency and purpose, knowing that innovation drives our success.

THE HOAI WAY

• Shoot for Impossible and Make it Happen: Sets audacious goals that others might see as unreachable and breaks them into actionable steps. Relentlessly perseveres through obstacles with resourcefulness and determination, turning ambitious vision into tangible results.
• Radical Candor Leads to Humble Excellence: Gives and receives direct, honest feedback with genuine care for others' growth. Stays open-minded on the path to continuous improvement, recognizing that the best outcome comes from carrying no ego.
• Hire and Develop the Best Talent: Actively seeks exceptional people who raise the bar and invests deeply in their growth. Creates opportunities for team members to stretch their capabilities, providing coaching and support that helps them reach their full potential.

WHY YOU SHOULD JOIN OUR TEAM

• Our eNPS is +68! (Google it, that is great).
• Benefits: Medical, Dental, and Vision kick in day one.
• Unlimited PTO (with a requirement for employees to take a minimum of one continuous week per year).
• 401K with Company Match.
• Remote Flexible - come to the office when needed.
• Great parental leave benefits.
• Named on Inc 5000 list of America's Fastest Growing Private Companies.
• Named on Inc 5000 Vet 100 Private Companies list multiple years in a row.
• Winner of Coastal Entrepreneur Award, Technology Category.
• Active employee-led Culture Committee.
• Ongoing industry and professional development trainings available to all employees.
• Multiple leaders on the executive committee recognized as 40 under 40 recipients for contributions to business and community.
• We're playing offense to win! Our product market fit and our world-class employees make us the leader in our space. We're building something cool and people like it here.

We receive many resumes for our open positions and each one is reviewed by a human being on our recruiting team. We will compare your background with the qualifications and requirements for the position. If you are selected for an interview you will receive an e-mail from someone on our recruiting team with an @vantaca.com email address. It may take some time for us to review all of the applications so give us some time to respond. We appreciate your interest in this role.