About the role

Lead core platform services that power a global SaaS product used by millions. Shape APIs, identity, and authorization. Strengthen delivery, lift people, and build a world-class developer experience.

• Lead a multidisciplinary engineering team
• Guide API, identity, and authorization platform evolution
• Build clarity, delivery rhythm, and strong NZ/US collaboration

This organisation provides a fintech platform that supports large, mission-driven organisations across the United States and abroad. Think transaction volume, and systems deeply embedded in how many of the largest communities connect, resource, and grow. With product expansion and continued platform evolution in flight, the business is strengthening engineering leadership to support scale, reliability, and tech advancement.

Why Now
The business is consolidating four legacy APIs into one unified platform and uplifting core identity and authentication services. These foundations support every product experience, every integration, and every developer who consumes the platform, whether internal or external.

This is not a reset role. The foundations already exist. The opportunity is to bring clarity, raise delivery quality, and guide a distributed team through the next chapter of the platform’s evolution. You will shape how the unified API develops, how identity and authorization services scale, and how platform capabilities become easier and more consistent for developers to work with. The work you lead will reach millions of end-users and hundreds of integration partners.

You will also play a part in shifting the organisation toward a true platform-first operating model, where domain teams expose their own capabilities through the unified API rather than relying on first-party integrations.

The Leadership Opportunity
You will lead a multidisciplinary group across API and integrations, identity, authentication, and authorization. Your leadership will influence how the unified API takes shape, how authentication and authorization flows integrate across the wider platform, and how developers experience the systems your team owns. 

You will create the conditions for clear, predictable delivery and lift the quality of planning, slicing, sequencing, and communication.

You will partner closely with Product, Staff Engineers, and Principal Engineers to translate platform strategy into tangible outcomes. You will help drive spec-driven development, guide decisions around versioning and deprecations, and ensure that platform services evolve in a way that supports both internal product teams and external developers.

You will also help coordinate work across New Zealand, the United States, and trusted external vendors, ensuring that parallel development streams meet the same engineering, quality, and security standards. Your leadership will strengthen communication across time zones, help the team navigate trade-offs, and ensure that technical and business direction remain aligned.

Beyond delivery, you will act as a connector, lifting context across teams, shaping a supportive and engaged culture, and helping people understand the purpose behind what they are building.

What Success Looks Like
A predictable delivery rhythm where work moves with fewer blockers and the team feels clear about direction. Developers, both internal and external, experience a simpler and more consistent platform with better tooling, documentation, and onboarding.

Progress toward the unified API becomes clearly visible. Identity and authentication services become more reliable and easier to integrate with. Collaboration across locations feels natural, supported, and well structured. Communication improves, and the team feels confident and aligned.

Your leadership is reflected in alignment, clarity, and overall team confidence.

Who You Are
You have led engineering teams within SaaS, platform, fintech, or other high-availability, multi-tenant environments. You are comfortable leading across several disciplines, including APIs, integrations, identity, authentication, and authorization, without needing to be hands-on in the code. 

You understand cloud-native architecture and how modern API platforms operate and can speak comfortably about OpenAPI, OAuth2, and when to use REST or GraphQL.

You bring experience leading distributed or hybrid teams and managing communication across time zones. You create structure where it is needed, strengthen delivery practices, and help people make solid technical and business decisions. You work collaboratively, share context freely, and build trust quickly. You care about engineering quality, developer experience, and creating an environment where people feel supported and confident.

You turn engineering progress into meaningful outcomes and make the path forward clear and understood.

If you thrive in a role where platform reliability, clarity, and collaboration matter and you enjoy building teams that deliver well, this is an opportunity to have real impact.