Senior Engineering Manager, Risk Engineering
Imprint · New York, United States +1 · 13h ago
Who We Are
Imprint helps the world's best brands grow the lifetime value of their customers. We started with co-branded credit cards and rebuilt them to be smarter, more rewarding, and brand-first. We partner with companies like Crate & Barrel, Rakuten, Booking.com, H-E-B, Fetch, and Shell to launch modern credit programs that deepen loyalty, unlock savings, and drive growth. But the card is just the beginning. We combine advanced payments infrastructure, intelligent underwriting, and deep customer data to create delightful and personalized experiences for members as well as efficient and profitable relationships for our brand partners. Our robust technology and world-class operations allow us and our brand partners to offer powerful financial products without becoming a bank.
In the U.S., co-branded cards alone account for over $300 billion in annual spend, and most still run on decades-old legacy bank systems. Imprint is the modern alternative: flexible, embeddable, and built for how people actually pay today. Backed by Kleiner Perkins, Thrive Capital, Ribbit, and Khosla Ventures, we're building a world-class team to redefine how people pay and how brands grow. If you want to move fast, solve hard problems, and own real outcomes, we want to meet you.
Risk Engineering owns the systems that execute Imprint's risk decisions in real time: transaction authorization and fraud scoring on every card swipe, the underwriting pipeline that evaluates every application, and the vendor integrations that power both. These are latency-sensitive, high-stakes distributed systems with a sprawling surface area and many stakeholders competing for the team's capacity. AI has made execution faster; the differentiator is the judgment to decide what to build, how to sequence it, and when to say no. That judgment, applied to a strong team and a hard domain, is what this Senior Engineering Manager owns.
The Opportunity
Own real-time authorization and fraud decisioning: Every card swipe runs through systems your team builds. Decisions happen in milliseconds, failures are visible immediately, and a wrong answer costs real money in either direction: fraud losses on one side, declined good customers on the other. You set the bar for how these systems are designed, tested, and operated.
Own the underwriting pipeline: Every application Imprint receives is evaluated by the pipeline your team owns, spanning credit, fraud, identity, and compliance checks. As Imprint launches new brand partners and new products, the pipeline has to absorb new policies and new data sources without becoming brittle.
Make vendor decisions that hold up in production: Fraud scoring, identity verification, and bureau data all run through third-party integrations. You'll evaluate vendor capabilities, weigh build-versus-buy with real latency and cost numbers, and push back on approaches that won't survive production load.
Prioritize across a wide surface cross-functional surface area: Credit, Fraud, Product, and Compliance all have legitimate asks and compete for the same engineering capacity. You'll bring clarity to poorly-scoped platform problems, decide what the team does and does not take on, and make the reasoning legible to stakeholders who didn't get what they asked for. You define the roadmap and scope the work yourself; nothing is abstracted through organizational layers.
Lead with technical credibility, amplified by AI: AI has collapsed the distance between management and IC work. Managers at Imprint use AI tools to investigate codebases, assess the complexity and viability of work, and bring clarity to ambiguous asks. You don't need to be on the critical path writing code (though some managers are), but you need the technical judgment to evaluate design trade-offs on latency-sensitive distributed systems and the modern tools to exercise it.
Lead a strong team as a craft: You inherit a strong, psychologically safe team of senior engineers. The job is to keep it that way while raising the ceiling: hand ICs ownership of entire domains, hold the bar on how work is scoped and delivered, and give feedback that changes outcomes. You have a real philosophy on how to hire, develop, and retain strong engineers, and clear written and verbal communication is how you exercise it.
Your Profile
5+ years of engineering management experience, with a track record of building, developing, and retaining strong engineering teams
You've managed through periods of rapid growth, ambiguity, or significant technical change, and your teams came out stronger
A strong technical foundation: you were a strong engineer before moving into management, and you've maintained technical credibility through hands-on engagement or modern AI tools
You've managed Staff-level ICs and helped senior engineers grow into bigger roles
You've owned latency-sensitive, high-availability distributed systems in production, where the cost of a wrong decision is measured in real dollars
You communicate with clarity and directness in writing, in 1:1s, in rooms with executives, and in rooms with engineers
You drive delivery through your team, not around them. You know how to scope work, set priorities, and create the conditions for engineers to do their best work
Experience using AI tools to stay close to technical work (investigating codebases, assessing feasibility, bringing clarity to asks), or genuine enthusiasm to adopt them
Experience in risk, fraud, underwriting, or payments is a plus
This is a backend team. We don't expect every candidate to match every bullet. If you're excited about what we're building and confident you can contribute, we'd love to talk.
Stack
Our backend runs on Go, MySQL, DynamoDB, Temporal, Kafka, Kubernetes, and AWS. Read more about how we build at Imprint on our engineering blog.
Perks & Benefits
Competitive compensation and equity packages
Leading configured work computers of your choice
Flexible paid time off
Fully covered, high-quality healthcare, including fully covered dependent coverage
Additional health coverage includes access to One Medical and the option to enroll in an FSA
20 weeks of paid parental leave for the primary caregiver and 8 weeks for all new parents
Access to industry-leading technology across all of our business units, stemming from our philosophy that we should invest in resources for our team that foster innovation, optimization, and productivity
Imprint is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Imprint is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status. Imprint welcomes talented individuals from all backgrounds who want to build the future of payments and rewards. If you are passionate about FinTech and eager to grow, let’s move the world forward, together.