Rain Logo

Rain

VP of Engineering

Posted One Month Ago
Hybrid
New York, NY
320K-450K Annually
Expert/Leader
Hybrid
New York, NY
320K-450K Annually
Expert/Leader
About the Company

Rain is the global stablecoin payments platform for enterprises, neobanks, platforms, developers, and AI agents. Our technology allows partners to move, store, and use stablecoins instantly and compliantly through global payment cards, rewards, on/offramps, wallets, and cross-border rails. As both a Visa and Mastercard Principal Member, Rain issues cards that work at more than 175 million merchant locations in over 220 countries and territories. Built natively for stablecoins and trusted by more than 100 organizations worldwide, Rain delivers secure, scalable infrastructure that makes money move freely and instantly around the world.

You will have the opportunity to deliver massive impact at a hypergrowth company backed by some of the top investors in fintech, crypto, and SaaS. In January 2026, we closed a $250M Series C led by ICONIQ, valuing Rain at $1.95B, with Sapphire Ventures, Dragonfly, Bessemer Venture Partners, Galaxy Ventures, FirstMark, Lightspeed, Norwest, and Endeavor Catalyst also participating. If you're curious, bold, and excited to help shape a borderless financial future, we'd love to talk.

 
Our Ethos

We believe in an open and flat structure. You will be able to grow into the role that most aligns with your goals. Our team members at all levels have the freedom to explore ideas and impact the roadmap and vision of our company.

About the Team

We are hiring a VP of Engineering to own the craft, quality, and technical direction of our roughly 50-person engineering organization as we enter our next stage of growth. We expect to approximately double the size of the team, and we’re looking for a leader who has successfully scaled a high-performing engineering organization while maintaining an exceptionally high technical bar.

This isn’t a role focused on adding headcount for the sake of growth. We want someone who can thoughtfully scale the team, strengthen the systems that move real money, and make our engineers significantly more effective as the organization grows. This leader should be deeply technical and genuinely engaged in the code, architecture, and engineering decisions—not operating adjacent to them.

You will lead through a mix of direct reports and a small group of engineering managers and tech leads, partnering closely with Product, Risk, and Compliance. You will spend your time on design reviews, incident retros, hiring, and the handful of technical bets that determine whether we can support the next order of magnitude of transaction volume.

If your ideal week is entirely calendar blocks and roadmap decks, this is not the right role. If your ideal week includes a hard design debate, a code review that changes someone's mind, and a coaching conversation that raises a manager's ceiling, keep reading.

What you’ll do
  • Own engineering strategy and architecture across card issuing, wallets, ledger, money movement, onchain settlement, and integrations with card networks and banking partners — including the multi-year technical roadmap that gets us there.

  • Set and own Rain's engineering quality bar across system design, code review, testing, observability, documentation, and technical decision-making, ensuring correctness is treated as critical for systems that move customer funds.

  • Go deep where the risk is. You won't own day-to-day code, but you will review critical designs, weigh in on the highest-consequence architecture and build-vs.-buy decisions, and be technical enough that no one can hand you a bad design and have it pass.

  • Drive reliability, scalability, and operational excellence by establishing SLOs, improving incident response, capacity planning for 10x growth, and designing resilient systems with graceful degradation, idempotency, and replay capabilities.

  • Build security, compliance, and correctness into the platform by design, partnering closely with Risk, Compliance, and Security to meet PCI, SOC 2, fraud-control, regulatory, and blockchain infrastructure requirements.

  • Increase engineering velocity without sacrificing quality through improvements to CI/CD, developer tooling, local environments, technical debt management, and architecture that enables teams to ship safely and independently.

  • Build and develop a high-performing engineering organization by hiring and coaching engineering managers and technical leads, establishing clear team ownership and boundaries, and owning headcount planning and the performance bar.

  • Operate as a member of the leadership team — translating company strategy into technical plans, partnering across Product, Design, Risk, Compliance, and GTM, and representing engineering to the board, banking and network partners, and customers.

You are likely to succeed if you have:
  • 15+ years building production software, including 8+ years leading engineers and meaningful time leading managers.

  • Current technical credibility. You have written or reviewed meaningful production code recently enough that an architecture review is a place you add value, not a place you nod along.

  • Deep experience with distributed backend systems at scale: data modeling, consistency and idempotency, queues and event-driven design, and the operational reality of running all of it.

  • A track record of raising an engineering bar. You can point to specific practices you introduced and the measurable change in quality, velocity, or reliability that followed.

  • Real reliability ownership — you have carried a pager, run incident command during a serious outage, and built the follow-through that kept it from recurring.

  • Experience in payments, fintech, banking infrastructure, or another domain where money, ledgers, or regulatory obligations made correctness non-negotiable.

  • You have hired and developed engineering managers, not only engineers. There are leaders you grew who would come work for you again.

  • Clear written communication. You can make a complex technical tradeoff legible to a CEO, a compliance officer, and a partner's engineering team in the same week.

  • Executive range. You are as comfortable in a board or partner conversation as you are in a design review, and you can hold a technical position under commercial pressure.

  • Comfort with ambiguity and speed. You would rather ship something correct this quarter than design something perfect for next year.

Bonus attributes:
  • Hands-on experience with card issuing, processing, or the Visa and Mastercard network stack.

  • Working knowledge of stablecoins, onchain settlement, custody and key management, or EVM and Solana infrastructure.

  • Experience operating under SOC 2, PCI DSS, or bank and program-manager oversight.

  • Experience leading distributed or multi-region teams.


Things that enable a fulfilling, healthy and happy experience at Rain:

Unlimited time off 🌴 Unlimited vacation can be daunting, so we require Rainmakers to take 10 days minimum for themselves.

Flexible working ☕ We support a flexible workplace – work from home, come into an office, or both. We want everyone to work in an environment where they're their most confident and productive selves. New Rainmakers receive a stipend to set up a comfortable home workspace.

Easy to access benefits 🧠 For US Rainmakers, we cover 95% of your health, dental, and vision plan costs and 90% for your dependents, plus a 100% company-subsidized life insurance plan.

Retirement goals💡 Plan for the future with confidence. We offer a 401(k) with a 4% company match.

Equity plan 📦 Every Rainmaker gets an equity option plan so we all benefit from our success.

Health and Wellness 📚 High performance begins from within. Rainmakers receive a monthly stipend to be used for eligible health and wellness spending like gym memberships/fitness classes, massages, acupuncture - whatever recharges you!

In-office meals 🍜 Rainmakers working from the office enjoy lunch and dinner on us, covered with a DoorDash credit.

Team summits ✨ Summits play an important role at Rain. Time together helps us build relationships and a common destiny. Expect team and company offsites, both domestic and international.

Similar Jobs

19 Days Ago
Easy Apply
Hybrid
Easy Apply
285K-540K Annually
Expert/Leader
285K-540K Annually
Expert/Leader
Marketing Tech • Mobile • Software
Leads Braze’s Channels engineering division through technical and product transformation. Oversees architecture, distributed systems, platform modularization, product development, AI-driven engineering initiatives, organizational growth, hiring, processes, and cross-functional collaboration with product and design teams. Builds and manages experienced engineering leaders and teams while improving reliability, efficiency, cost effectiveness, product differentiation, and development velocity.
Top Skills: Ai AgentsAi-Assisted EngineeringDistributed SystemsEmailLinePush NotificationsSms/Mms/RcsWebhooksWhatsapp
Yesterday
Remote or Hybrid
U.S.
220K-260K Annually
Expert/Leader
220K-260K Annually
Expert/Leader
Enterprise Web • Fintech • HR Tech • Payments • Social Impact • Software • Financial Services
Leads day-to-day engineering execution for a lean, senior team while remaining hands-on with production code, architecture, incident response, and AI-assisted development. Owns delivery, quality, reliability, security, cloud costs, automation, and technical standards across multi-tenant SaaS platforms on AWS and Azure with Kubernetes. Partners with Product, Design, Support, and the CTO to build AI features, improve engineering productivity, hire and develop talent, and maintain predictable delivery.
Top Skills: AWSAzureCi/CdClaude CodeCursorDevOpsDora MetricsGdprGithub CopilotKubernetesLlmsSoc 2
Senior level
Fintech • Financial Services
Build and operate production-grade data pipelines, forecasting models, financial-planning models, economic scenario workflows, and analytical products. Partner with modelers to operationalize statistical and machine learning solutions with testing, monitoring, controls, documentation, and scalable architectures. Establish technical direction across divisions, manage stakeholders, review designs and code, mentor practitioners, and support Finance, Risk, Engineering, and business teams.
Top Skills: Agentic SystemsAnalytical DatabasesAnaplanCloud PlatformsData OrchestrationData PipelinesDatabricksLakehouse ArchitecturesMachine LearningPythonRRelational DatabasesRustSparkSQL

What you need to know about the Chicago Tech Scene

With vibrant neighborhoods, great food and more affordable housing than either coast, Chicago might be the most liveable major tech hub. It is the birthplace of modern commodities and futures trading, a national hub for logistics and commerce, and home to the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association. This diverse blend of industry influences has helped Chicago emerge as a major player in verticals like fintech, biotechnology, legal tech, e-commerce and logistics technology. It’s also a major hiring center for tech companies on both coasts.

Key Facts About Chicago Tech

  • Number of Tech Workers: 245,800; 5.2% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
  • Major Tech Employers: McDonald’s, John Deere, Boeing, Morningstar
  • Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, fintech, software, logistics technology
  • Funding Landscape: $2.5 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
  • Notable Investors: Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Arch Venture Partners, MATH Venture Partners, Jump Capital, Hyde Park Venture Partners
  • Research Centers and Universities: Northwestern University, University of Chicago, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Illinois Institute of Technology, Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

Sign up now Access later

Create Free Account

Please log in or sign up to report this job.

Create Free Account