About The Company
Founders today are building global companies from day one — but the systems that manage their money were built for a different era. Aspire exists to change that!
We're building the financial operating system for global founders, bringing banking, software, and automation into a single platform so businesses can move faster across borders and stay focused on building.
Aspire is built by people who think from first principles, care deeply about solving hard problems, and take real ownership of their work. Our team brings global experience from leading fintech and technology companies, and many of us are former founders and operators who understand what it takes to build thoughtfully, make trade-offs, and deliver at scale in a global environment.
Backed by leading global investors including Y Combinator, Peak XV, and Lightspeed, Aspire has been trusted by more than 50,000 startups and growing businesses worldwide to manage their finances since 2018. Together with partners like J.P. Morgan, Visa, and Wise, we're building for the next generation of global companies.
About The Role
We're looking for a Director, Engineering to own AspireOS engineering, not just lead a team, but run it as a product-focused engineering organisation. You'll set the technical vision for the vertical, own how the team is built and structured, and be accountable for the quality and pace of what ships along with the architecture decisions that will define how the product scales.
This is a role for someone who operates at the intersection of product depth and engineering rigour: you think about what we're building and why, not just how.
You'll partner directly with Product, Design, and cross-functional leadership to shape the roadmap — and you'll be expected to have opinions on it, not just execute against it. The team runs on agentic AI tooling as standard practice, and you'll be setting the standard for how that evolves, not catching up to it.
This is not a coordination role. You own the outcomes — delivery quality, team health, architecture, and the engineering strategy for one of Aspire's highest-growth verticals.
What You'll Own
- Own AspireOS engineering end-to-end: team structure, delivery pace, technical quality, and the engineering strategy for the vertical as it grows in product scope and business complexity.
- Set the technical vision for AspireOS, defining architecture direction, platform standards, and the engineering principles the team builds against, with full accountability for those decisions.
- Drive MVP launches of new products from zero to production, then build the systems and processes to scale them.
- Set and enforce the agentic AI standard for the vertical, define how the team uses AI-assisted tooling in the SDLC, measure adoption, and continuously raise the bar on what's expected from every engineer.
- Own technical architecture decisions for AspireOS form setting patterns, enforcing standards, and making the tradeoffs between speed, scalability, and debt with full accountability.
- Be a genuine product partner, shape what gets built alongside Product and Design, bring engineering constraints and possibilities into roadmap conversations early, and have a clear point of view on prioritisation.
- Drive talent density: set the hiring bar for your teams, calibrate AI capability assessments, and build an organisation where the weakest engineer is still strong.
- Develop people, not just coach them on delivery, but develop them as leaders: how they grow their engineers, how they handle hard decisions.
- Build and hold a high-quality SDLC: automated test coverage, contract tests, CI/CD hygiene, deployment confidence — the infrastructure of quality that lets the team move fast without accumulating hidden risk.
- Represent engineering credibly to senior leadership and cross-functional stakeholders — not with status reports, but with the context and judgement that changes how decisions get made.
- Identify and own technical risk across AspireOS — surface it early, drive the mitigation, and prevent it from becoming a production incident or a roadmap blocker.
Minimum Qualifications
- 12+ years in software engineering
- 5+ years in engineering leadership roles managing Engineering Managers
- Proven track record owning engineering verticals or orgs of 20+ engineers
- 0 → 1 product launches at pace - shipped MVPs that scaled, not just maintained existing systems
- Hands-on technical background: credible in architecture reviews and code discussions
- Experience in fintech, payments, SaaS, or regulated technology strongly preferred
- Architecture fluency: distributed systems, microservices, event-driven, cloud-native at scale
- Cloud platform depth — GCP, AWS, or Azure; production-grade infra decisions
- Quality engineering — test strategy, contract tests (Pact), CI/CD, coverage standards
- Go, PHP, or strong opinionated BE engineering background with full stack exposure
- Active practitioner of agentic AI coding tools - Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent
- Strong cross-functional leadership: shaped product roadmaps, not just executed them
What Sets The Right Person Apart
- You've led 0→1 product builds at pace, shipped MVPs, learned fast, and scaled; not just feature delivery within established products.
- You think in systems and products, not just tickets and sprints. You can hold a product vision and engineering roadmap, and last week's deployment at the same time.
- You're ahead of the industry on agentic AI. You've already reworked how engineering teams operate around these tools.
- You've built high-performing teams in high-growth environments, and you know how to do it lean, without making headcount growth the default answer to scope growth.
- You're comfortable with ambiguity and fast pivots. You build systems that are flexible, not fragile, and you don't mistake slowness for rigour.
- You hold quality as a personal standard, not a process requirement. You know what good code looks like, and your teams feel that.
What We Look For In The Person
- High ownership: you treat the product, the team, and the outcomes as yours. If something is broken, you're already working on it; you're not waiting to be asked.
- Directness: you say what you think, you're open to being wrong, and you don't let unspoken concerns accumulate into surprises or avoidable misalignments.
- Builder's instinct: you're energised by shipping, not by managing shipping. Your teams feel the difference, and it shapes the culture.
- Quality as identity: you hold a high bar on code, systems, and architecture because it's who you are, not because there's a process requiring it.
- Intellectual honesty: you distinguish clearly between a hard tradeoff and a convenient excuse, and you call it plainly, including when it's your own decision being examined.
- Empathy with the edge: you build strong teams by investing in people, but you don't confuse care with avoiding hard conversations.
Why This Role
- Full ownership of a high-growth vertical: You'll run AspireOS engineering with the authority and accountability of a business unit leader, not an execution layer.
- AI-first engineering culture: Aspire is rebuilding engineering workflows around agentic tooling, and this role owns that transformation for AspireOS. Not a pilot, this is how we build.
- Startup intensity at real scale: Aspire has product-market fit across 50,000+ businesses and is growing fast. You get the pace of an early-stage environment with the complexity of operating at genuine scale.
- Scope without headcount bloat: the team stays lean while the product keeps expanding. You'll manage complexity and capability growth, not just org chart growth.
- Influence on company direction: at Director level, you'll have a seat in the conversations that shape how Aspire builds engineering across all verticals, not just AspireOS.
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