Role Overview
As the Engineering Manager, you will lead a new engineering squad working in US hours on a crypto payment platform. This is a high-delegation role: the Director of Engineering stays accountable, while you take real responsibility for outcomes: delivery, team health, quality, and process. We hire for judgment and autonomy: you are expected to carry the quality bar yourself, surface problems early, and make decisions without waiting for permission. The squad is being formed now: you will help shape it and hire its people.
Key Responsibilities
- Own delivery and predictability: realistic commitments the team meets, a stable delivery rhythm you own, and progress that is visible to stakeholders without micromanagement or surprises
- Build and grow the team: hire and onboard new engineers, set expectations from day one, maintain development paths and regular feedback for every team member, and monitor workload to prevent burnout
- Own quality and stability habits: incident response with follow-through, postmortems that lead to real changes, low bug leakage to production, and no same mistake should happen twice
- Keep technical debt visible and managed: track and prioritize it with Product, protect a stable share of team time for improvements, and raise structural risks before they become production issues
- Own risks and transparency: know the top risks of your team at any moment, escalate early and calmly, and own both decisions and outcomes
- Establish team practices for AI-assisted development: review standards and quality gates that keep AI-generated slop out of the codebase, documentation, and product, while using AI tooling to raise team throughput
- Maintain a strong remote and async culture: documented decisions, productive 1:1s and retros, shared context, and psychological safety to raise issues
- Ensure day-to-day security and compliance hygiene in a regulated environment: least-privilege access, proper handling of data and secrets, immediate transparency on incidents
- Act as a designated backup for the Director of Engineering in incident management and regulatory incident reporting, as defined in the internal policies of a regulated entity, including completion of the associated compliance training
- Manage stakeholders: work closely with Product on priorities, defend engineering concerns, and keep cross-functional collaboration with QA, Infra, and Support smooth
Required Qualifications
- 4-5+ years of engineering leadership experience (Engineering Manager, Team Lead), including owning a team without close supervision from above
- Prior hands-on backend engineering background (TypeScript or similar modern stack) with a strong grasp of system design: able to hold architecture discussions with senior engineers, challenge technical decisions credibly, and raise valid concerns
- Understanding of the crypto and stablecoin domain: prior crypto experience is optional, and deep on-the-job learning of the domain is a mandatory part of the role
- Confident use of AI tools in your own management workflow (analysis, documentation, decision preparation), and the ability to build team practices around AI-assisted development, keeping unreviewed or low-quality AI-generated output out of documentation and product
- Track record of hiring and onboarding engineers, and of evaluating performance honestly, including hard conversations
- High agency: you run the team without close supervision, surface problems before they are found for you, and own the outcomes of your decisions
- Understanding of the SDLC and familiarity with key non-functional requirements: performance, reliability, security, observability, scalability
- Ability to operate in a distributed, async-first team environment across timezones
- Excellent communication skills in English, both written and verbal
Preferred Experience
- Experience in fintech, payments, or crypto
- Experience in regulated environments (licensing, audits, compliance-driven engineering requirements)
- Experience building a team or squad from scratch, including defining its composition
- Experience managing teams distributed across timezones
- Familiarity with the TypeScript / Node.js ecosystem
Reporting Structure
Reports to the Director of Engineering. Direct people management of the squad’s engineers.
Why This Role
- A new squad you help shape and hire yourself
- A high-trust, high-transparency management framework with explicitly documented success criteria: you will know exactly how your work is evaluated
- An AI-first engineering organization where management leverage is the core bet
Location
Remote. USA, Argentina, or Brazil. The role works US business hours (Eastern Time). A minimum of 4 hours of daily overlap with Central European working hours is a standing company requirement.
Compensation and Benefits
As an independent contractor, you'll enjoy the flexibility to determine how and when you deliver your work, while partnering closely with our team to meet agreed milestones and business objectives. Compensation and engagement terms will be outlined in your contractor agreement.
Additional Benefits
- Company issued laptop
- Technology Accessories
- Annual In-Person Full-Team Meetup
4+ years engineering leadership, hands-on backend experience (TypeScript/Node.js), SDLC and system-design knowledge, hiring/onboarding experience, async remote work skills, strong English communication.
Key Responsibilities
- managing delivery
- building team
- ensuring compliance
Skills & Tools
TypeScript, Node.js
Job Details
- Category: Engineering
- Seniority: Senior Level
- Commitment: Contract
- Workplace: Remote — United States or Argentina or Brazil
- Languages: English
About Cyclops
Provides an all-in-one solution powering crypto and stablecoin payment platforms for payments companies. — Industry: Information Technology