Engineering Manager

About Sapiom

Sapiom is building payment infrastructure for AI agents. We enable agents to make purchases for people, manage payments between businesses, and buy the compute, inference, and APIs they need to operate. As agents become part of everyday life, we're building toward the experiences people will use to trust them with their money: one place to set what agents can do, see what they did, and stay in control across every agent they use.

Through one integration, Sapiom connects agents to funding sources and payment methods. Our intent verification checks that each transaction matches what the person or business authorized. Spending controls define where and how much agents can spend, with a record of every transaction and its outcome. We're building toward a world where people and businesses can delegate payments to agents with confidence.

We're a small team in San Francisco with deep experience in payments and infrastructure. Our founder was Director of Engineering in Payments at Shopify for five years. We've raised $50 million in our first 12 months from Accel, Dragonfly, Coinbase Ventures, Okta Ventures, Menlo Ventures and Anthropic.

About the role

Agents are starting to move money on people's behalf, and every transaction has to be fast, correct and auditable the first time. The infrastructure that makes this safe is being built now, and the team building it needs an engineering manager who ships quickly without breaking the money.

You'll manage a team of Sapiom engineers and grow it over the next year, partnering with our product manager to turn the roadmap into shipped product. This is a high-autonomy, player-coach role, with roughly half your time in code and half leading people. The right person has managed payments or fintech engineers, still ships real code, and treats reliable, on-time delivery as a craft. You'll use AI to help the team move fast without shipping slop: agents speed up the work, but your engineers still own, review and test every line that touches money.

What you will do

Own execution for your team end to end: how it plans, builds, ships and runs its part of Sapiom's stack, from APIs and SDKs to the ledger and infrastructure behind every transaction. You'll write code alongside your engineers, make technical calls with the founder and senior engineers, and keep your systems reliable as transaction volume grows.

You'll also grow your team: hiring great engineers, giving direct feedback, and giving each person a clear path to grow. The goal: a team that ships the roadmap on time, builds great product customers trust with their money, and gets stronger every quarter.

Responsibilities

• Partner with our product manager to deliver the roadmap on time: know your team's real capacity and scope projects accurately, so the roadmap reflects what you can ship well, and flag risks before they become slips.
• Spend about half your time shipping: take on hard features, review pull requests, and set the bar for testing, observability and code quality by example.
• Own correctness and reliability for money movement: idempotency, reconciliation, incident response and on-call, so every transaction is accounted for and outages are rare and short.
• Build a team engineers want to work and grow in, with a culture of trust and high ownership, regular, direct feedback and a growth plan for every person.
• Build an engineering practice that scales: set how we build and ship, make security part of everyday work, and manage tooling, vendors and cloud costs in partnership with ops.
• Grow your team with the founder and recruiting: shape the hiring plan for your area, run a structured interview loop, close strong candidates, and help new engineers ship to production in their first week.

Requirements

• 7+ years as a software engineer and engineering manager in payments or fintech, including time directly managing engineers who shipped production systems that move real money.
• Deep knowledge of how money moves in software: ledgers, idempotency, reconciliation, card and bank rails, and the compliance constraints (PCI, KYC) that shape system design.
• You still want to be a hands-on engineer: you love writing production backend code, reason clearly about distributed systems and data consistency, and earn your team's trust in design and code review.
• Fluent in AI: you use coding agents like Claude Code or Cursor daily, keep up with the latest models and tooling, and experiment with what helps the team build a better product without letting quality slip.
• A record of executional excellence at startup pace: you've shipped roadmaps on time with a product partner, cut scope without cutting quality, and say plainly when something will slip.
• You grow people: you've hired strong engineers, given hard feedback with care, built career paths, and seen engineers you managed earn promotions.
• Nice to have: You've managed engineers at a Series A or earlier startup, or built agent, stablecoin or machine-to-machine payment systems.

Logistics

• Location: San Francisco in office five days a week.
• Reports to: CEO