[Hiring] Engineering Manager @Cardiff

Role Description

Cardiff's edge is how quickly we can convert a lead into a funded customer. Today our average turnaround is 24 business hours; our goal is minutes, through automated systems with human-in-the-loop oversight. We have the projects, the budget, and the stakeholders lined up to get there. What we need is one person accountable for the whole department: for what ships, when it ships, and whether it holds up in production.

This is the senior technology role at Cardiff, and it is a hands-on job rather than a strategy seat. You will run the engineering department day to day, carry the delivery dates yourself, and build alongside the team when that's the fastest way to unblock them.

What You'll Own

• Delivery: Every committed date in the department, including the ones you inherit.
• The team: Hiring, onboarding, one-on-ones, performance, and growth for in-house engineers and contractors; you'll inherit an open Senior Full-Stack Engineer (AI-Native) req and run that search.
• The platform: Our Salesforce/Fundingo core, the Cardiff API, Snowflake, cloud infrastructure, and the migration path off legacy systems.
• AI products in production: Customer-facing agents for collections, renewals, and win-back campaigns, plus internal agents that take work off people's plates.
• The knowledge layer: The graph and the pipelines that feed it, and the standard that new systems connect to it.
• Vendors: Technical evaluation, integration ownership, and honest reporting on whether a vendor is earning its invoice.
• Production quality and security: Uptime, data integrity, access control, and the incident response when something breaks.

What Success Looks Like

• First 30 days: You've met every stakeholder, inventoried what's in flight, and given the Managing Partner a written assessment of each project: real status, real risk, and a date you're willing to be held to. You've told us at least one thing we're doing that you'd stop.
• First 90 days: A weekly delivery rhythm the business can see without asking for it. At least two stalled projects either shipped to production or formally killed. One agent-built workflow running end to end with the evals and human checkpoints to prove it's safe. Your first hire in process.
• First year: Measurable movement on time-to-fund, with the automation to show for it. A team that ships on a predictable cadence, where the engineers are visibly better than when they joined. The knowledge graph in real use, with agents and people querying it instead of hunting through five systems. A roadmap the business trusts, because the last three quarters of commitments landed. Systems that stay up, and a technology spend you can defend line by line.

What You'll Do

• Run planning and prioritization with the department heads, and say no when the answer is no.
• Give proactive status: the business hears about slipped dates from you, on the day you know, not from asking.
• Design and operate agent systems: orchestration loops, multi-step tool use, retrieval against the graph, evals, and the human checkpoints that make them safe to run on customers.
• Review code and architecture, and stay close enough to production to know when an AI-generated pull request is wrong.
• Manage the offshore and contract developers to the same standard as the in-house team.
• Build against our stack: Salesforce, Snowflake, Gmail, Zoom, Slack, Twilio, and internal tools.
• Make AI tooling the department's default way of building, and hold the line on reading what it produces before it ships.
• Ship a working v1 today and improve it Monday, instead of a "perfect" v1 a month from now.
• Own the incident when something breaks in production, including the write-up afterward.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building production software, with 3+ years managing engineers directly; you've run a team of 4 or more.
• A track record of hitting dates on projects you owned, and a clear story about a date you missed and what you did about it.
• Still technical: you've written and shipped production code in the last year, and you can read a pull request and catch what's wrong with it.
• Agent systems in production, not prototypes: orchestration loops, graphs, multi-step tool use, multi-agent patterns, RAG over real data, and evals you actually run.
• Coding agents as your primary way of building; Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or similar, with a recent example of delivering something 3–5x faster than you could have without them.
• Range across the stack: Python, modern JavaScript/TypeScript, SQL, REST/GraphQL, and cloud deployment (AWS preferred).
• Build-vs-adopt judgment: fluent enough in the open-source AI ecosystem to reach for a strong community project rather than hand-rolling what already exists.
• Communication discipline: you escalate early in writing, and your stakeholders always know where things stand.

Nice to have

• Knowledge graphs, entity resolution, or unified data layers built for machine consumption.
• Fintech, lending, payments, or another regulated data environment.
• Salesforce APIs, Snowflake, or replacing a CRM-as-application architecture.
• Contributions to open-source AI projects.
• Experience as the most senior technical person in a small company.

Compensation and Benefits

• Base salary from $180,000, with room above it for the right person.
• Performance bonus of up to 30% of base, tied to delivery and business outcomes.
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• 401(k) plan.
• Flexible PTO and observed holidays.
• Remote-first, with support for your home-office setup.
• Direct access to leadership and to the problems that matter.