Vice President, Engineering

Company Description

Novo is a venture-backed fintech that simplifies banking for small businesses. Since our Fall 2018 beta launch, we've expanded offerings from free checking accounts and debit cards to lending products, business tools (invoices, bookkeeping, and more), and integrations.

Today, Novo is a powerfully simple banking platform that serves over 250,000 small businesses. In addition to providing smart tools built for entrepreneurs to better run and grow their businesses, Novo has processed billions in transactions in partnership with a number of established banking partners.

Our vision is to be the go-to platform serving small businesses – from launch to everyday – so business owners can focus on growing, while Novo provides seamless money movement, money storage, and access to capital. We'd like to look back 5–10 years from now and know that we helped new generations of small businesses succeed because of the work we did at Novo.

Novo raised $170 million in venture capital and is backed by leading investors, including Stripes, Valar Ventures, Crosslink Capital, and Notable Capital (formerly GGV). Learn more at https://www.novo.co.

Role Description

Novo is seeking a highly experienced and motivated engineering leader to own and scale our technology organization, architecture, and engineering execution. This role is critical to ensuring the reliability, security, and velocity of the platform that powers banking for over 250,000 small businesses, supporting our rapidly expanding team and business operations. The ideal candidate is a hands-on leader who can set technical direction, build and grow high-performing engineering teams, harness AI to accelerate both what we build and how we build it, and partner closely with Product, Design, and Operations to ship reliable, secure, high-quality software within a dynamic, regulated fintech environment.

Responsibilities

Engineering Leadership & Management

• Own the strategy, execution, and overall health of Novo's engineering organization across product, platform, and infrastructure.

• Set technical direction and standards, balancing delivery velocity with quality, security, and long-term maintainability.

• Lead, mentor, and grow a multi-team engineering organization, including engineering managers and senior individual contributors, fostering a culture of ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

• Recruit, develop, and retain top engineering talent; define career paths, performance standards, and leveling.

• Establish and run a healthy software development lifecycle, ensuring predictable, timely delivery and successful outcomes.

Architecture & Technical Strategy

• Define and evolve the architecture of Novo's core banking platform, money-movement systems, card and ledger infrastructure, and public-facing surfaces.

• Drive key technical initiatives spanning core ledger and account infrastructure, payments and money-movement rails, card systems, platform/API surface area, and the customer-facing application.

• Make sound build-vs-buy and platform-vs-partner decisions, managing technical trade-offs and debt deliberately.

• Ensure systems are designed for scale, resilience, observability, and cost efficiency.

Reliability, Security & Quality

• Own platform reliability, availability, and performance, including incident response, on-call practices, and post-incident learning.

• Partner with InfoSec, Risk, and Compliance to embed security and regulatory requirements into the engineering process and ship products responsibly.

• Establish and uphold engineering quality practices, including testing, code review, CI/CD, and change management.

• Oversee disaster recovery, data integrity, and the controls required in a regulated financial environment.

AI Strategy & Engineering Productivity

• Define and drive the engineering organization's approach to AI, both as a capability embedded in Novo's products and as a tool that raises the velocity and quality of how the team builds.

• Champion responsible adoption of AI-assisted development (e.g., code generation, review, testing, and operational tooling) and establish the guardrails, evaluation practices, and standards that keep it safe and effective.

• Partner with Product, Data, Risk, and Compliance to evaluate where AI and ML meaningfully improve the customer experience, and ensure AI-powered features meet the security, privacy, fairness, and regulatory bar required in financial services.

• Stay abreast of the rapidly evolving AI landscape, applying informed judgment to separate durable capability from hype and to make deliberate build-vs-buy decisions on models, infrastructure, and vendors.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Partner closely with Product and Design leadership to align on roadmap, scope, and sequencing, and to turn product strategy into reliable delivery.

• Collaborate with Operations, Compliance, Legal, and banking partners to navigate the regulatory requirements inherent to a fintech company.

• Communicate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders, from individual contributors to the executive team and board.

• Manage relationships and technical integrations with banking partners and key third-party vendors.

Delivery & Execution

• Define and track the engineering metrics that matter, including delivery throughput, reliability, and quality.

• Hold the organization accountable to outcomes, removing blockers and continuously improving how teams work.

• Balance near-term delivery commitments with the platform investments needed to support future growth.

Strategic Planning & Budgeting

• Contribute to strategic planning for future technology needs and the broader engineering and product roadmap.

• Develop and manage the engineering budget, including headcount, tooling, and infrastructure spend, optimizing for impact while ensuring teams have the resources needed to deliver.

Minimum Qualifications

• 12–18+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, with at least 3–5 years in a senior engineering leadership role (preferably in fintech, financial services, or banking).

• Demonstrable experience building, scaling, and leading multi-team engineering organizations in a high-growth, regulated environment.

• Strong architectural background designing distributed, high-availability systems, ideally involving money movement, payments, ledgers, or other financial infrastructure.

• Expertise across modern cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), backend and frontend technologies, data systems, and CI/CD practices.

• Strong understanding of reliability, security, and compliance practices relevant to financial services (e.g., SOC 2, PCI DSS).

• Proven ability to lead and develop engineering managers and senior engineers, manage complex cross-functional initiatives, and communicate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Strong product sense and a track record of partnering with Product and Design to ship customer-facing software.

• Practical experience adopting AI in the engineering workflow and/or shipping AI- or ML-powered product capabilities, with sound judgment about where AI adds real value and where it introduces risk.

• Strong problem-solving skills and a proactive, pragmatic approach to technical and organizational challenges.

• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, evolving startup environment.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field required; advanced degree preferred.