Director of Engineering - Assets & Issuance

Applying to Paxos? Our only careers site is paxos.com/careers, and we only recruit via @paxos.com email. Details below.
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About Paxos

Today’s financial infrastructure is archaic, expensive, inefficient and risky — supporting a system that leaves out more people than it lets in. So we’re rebuilding it.

We’re on a mission to open the world’s financial system to everyone by enabling the instant movement of any asset, any time, in a trustworthy way. For over a decade, we’ve built blockchain infrastructure that tokenizes, custodies, trades and settles assets for the world's leading financial institutions, like PayPal, Venmo, Mastercard, Interactive Brokers and Charles Schwab.

About the team

Engineering at Paxos builds and operates the systems that move real money: stablecoin issuance, custody, trading, settlement and the ledgers that underpin them. Our engineers work on distributed systems and blockchain infrastructure where reliability, security and correctness are non-negotiable, and they work in close partnership with Product, Security and Compliance.

About the role

As our Director of Engineering, you will build and lead the engineering organization responsible for Assets & Issuance, shaping the architecture, growing the team and setting the direction as we scale. As our Director of Engineering, you will lead teams of engineers, directly and through engineering managers, responsible for Assets & Issuance. This is a leadership role for someone who has built money-moving infrastructure in the past and can shape how systems get designed and built. You won't be writing production code day to day, but you will go deep on architecture, reliability and hard technical decisions alongside your teams. You'll tackle hard problems in issuing and moving assets across blockchains, customers and jurisdictions, working with strong engineers and limited existing structure. You'll be expected to set technical direction, build the team and deliver.

Success looks like a team that ships quickly without compromising correctness, systems that are resilient and well understood, a strong bench of engineering managers and senior ICs, and a trusted partnership with Security, Compliance and Product that accelerates delivery rather than slowing it down.

What you’ll do

• Own the technical strategy, roadmap and delivery for Assets & Issuance, balancing speed to market with the reliability and controls our regulated, institutional customers expect.

• Stay close to the code and the architecture: review designs, pressure-test tradeoffs, and lead by example in hard technical decisions.

• Build and grow the team as needed: hire senior engineers and managers, develop emerging leaders, and shape an engineering culture centered on ownership, craft and bias to action.

• Lead through incidents: set the standard for on-call, incident response, root-cause analysis and follow-through, and drive down operational risk over time.

• Partner with Product, Security, Compliance and other control functions to design systems that are secure and auditable by construction, with controls built into the software rather than layered on afterward.

• Make progress with incomplete information. Break ambiguous problems into shippable pieces, set direction, and adjust as you learn.

• Drive the architecture of systems such as wallets and key management, ledgers, settlement and blockchain integrations, depending on team charter.

• Build an engineering organization that uses AI and modern tools to fundamentally improve how software is built, tested and operated, with just enough process to scale without slowing down.

• Represent engineering to executive leadership, translating technical complexity into clear priorities, tradeoffs and commitments.

• Immerse yourself in blockchain technology, digital assets, our regulation-first approach, and more!

About you

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including 8+ years leading engineering teams, with experience managing managers. We care more about the career pattern than the exact numbers.

• You've been an early engineer or engineering leader at a fast-growing company, built systems from scratch and scaled both the technology and the engineering organization.

• A track record of building teams, not just inheriting them, with experience leading a sizable engineering organization, including managers, and growing it as the business scaled.

• Built and operated complex distributed systems where correctness, reliability and security are critical. Experience with money-moving infrastructure is strongly preferred, but exceptional builders from other high-stakes systems are equally compelling..

• Meaningful depth in several areas: distributed systems, blockchain infrastructure, MPC or key management, high-availability systems, security-sensitive financial software.

• Strong technical credibility with senior engineers. You can go deep on architecture, reliability and hard technical decisions, and you earn the respect of the engineers you lead.

• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and moving quickly without highly defined requirements.

• Experience working effectively with Product, Security and Compliance, applying the right amount of process to keep teams aligned and controls intact without slowing down delivery.

• A builder's instinct. When faced with a messy technical or organizational problem, your first move is to dig in and find a way through it.

• Nice to have: experience at both startup and scaled-company environments, prior experience in a regulated environment (e.g., a trust company, broker-dealer or exchange), and direct experience with blockchain protocols or smart contracts.

Important Notice for Paxos Applicants
Fraudulent accounts sometimes pose as Paxos recruiters on LinkedIn and other platforms, and fake websites sometimes impersonate our careers site. These scammers attempt to deceive applicants into paying for job opportunities or providing personal financial information.

To verify a legitimate Paxos opportunity:

• Our only official careers site is paxos.com/careers

• We only use @paxos.com email addresses

• We never ask for payment or financial details to apply, interview, or work here

• For technical roles, we do not perform a coding interview without prior screening by our engineering team

Thanks for your interest in Paxos!