Director, Software Engineering
Description
The Director of Engineering will manage and continue to grow a world‐class software engineering team for our award-winning products and drive the successful delivery of platforms and products while contributing to the product strategy, platform, and roadmap.
This opportunity is ideal for an engineering leader who specializes in high-volume financial systems. You won’t just be integrating third-party APIs; you will lead the team responsible for architecting and scaling our proprietary internal payment system. You will oversee the network of services ensuring that every cent moving through our ecosystem is accounted for, secure, and compliant, and working in an environment that empowers small teams to collaboratively set the technical direction of our financial infrastructure. We are looking for a forward-thinking leader with a blend of engineering and payments experience who can also harness the power of today’s AI advancements to revolutionize payment integrity, automating fraud detection and operational workflows at scale.
The location for the position is Santa Barbara, CA.
Your Impact:
- Set the technical direction for internal ledgering systems, ensuring absolute data consistency, idempotency, and accuracy across distributed microservices.
- Oversee the engineering of Payables and Receivables flows, ensuring seamless integration between internal services and external banking institutions.
- Act as the primary technical counterpart for banking partners and payment processors, translating complex external requirements into internal engineering roadmaps.
- Build automated reconciliation frameworks that detect and self-heal discrepancies between internal ledgers and external networks, ensuring 100% financial accuracy.
- Partner with InfoSec and Legal to ensure all payment services adhere to PCI-DSS, NACHA operating rules, AML (Anti-Money Laundering) protocols, and KYC/KYB requirements.
- Advocate for a SMART codebase (Simple, Maintainable, Agile, Refactored, and Tested) to deliver a SAFE product (Secure, Available, Fast, and Easy).
- Oversee the delivery of software using Agile best practices, CI/CD, and test-driven development to ensure frequent, high-confidence releases.
- Drive the strategy for integrating AI/ML models directly into the transaction path to detect fraud anomalies in real-time, optimize payment routing (Smart Routing) for cost/speed, and automate complex reconciliation matches that rule-based systems miss.
- Recruit, screen, and close high-caliber engineering talent, scaling the team to meet the demands of a hyper-growth payments organization.
- Lead, coach, and support a team of passionate engineers, creating an environment of creativity, speed, and innovation while maintaining the discipline required for financial engineering.
- Instill a sense of ownership over the entire software development lifecycle, ensuring the team understands how their work directly impacts AppFolio’s financial success and customer trust.
- Build trusting relationships with Product Management, Legal, and Risk teams to align engineering resources with company strategy, balancing immediate customer needs with long-term infrastructure investments.
- Implement processes and metrics to ensure the team is focused, efficient, and that products are market-ready and scalable.
- BS, MS, or Ph.D. in Computer Science or related technical discipline.
- 8+ years of hands-on software development experience building enterprise SaaS, cloud-based solutions, or consumer web platforms supporting millions of users and online transactions per month.
- 5+ years of demonstrated success hiring, directly managing, coaching, and retaining world-class engineers.
- Proven track record leading engineering teams during the evolution of the function from start-up to mid-lifecycle/hyper-growth.
- Experience building or managing proprietary payment platforms, not just integrations. Must understand the mechanics of ACH files, credit card processing (ISO 8583), and emerging rails (RTP/FedNow).
- Experience integrating directly with banking cores and legacy financial institutions, managing both modern API-based exchanges and file-based exchanges.
- Working knowledge of financial frameworks including PCI-DSS Level 1, SOC 1/SOC 2, NACHA operating rules, and KYC/KYB/AML protocols.
- Strong grasp of ACID transactions versus eventual consistency, particularly regarding financial ledgers, idempotency, and double-entry accounting within a multi-service architecture.
- Demonstrated ability to design systems that maintain 99.999% availability during high-volume transaction windows, ensuring resilience and rapid recovery.
- Experience partnering with Data Science teams to operationalize machine learning models within critical production paths. Must understand the latency and reliability trade-offs of embedding inference engines into real-time payment processing.
- Recent experience using Agile methodologies and a deep understanding of release management workflows, from development through staging and production deployment.
- Exceptional interpersonal skills with a proven ability to build productive cross-departmental relationships (Product, Legal, Risk, Support). Must have a positive, can-do attitude and value collaboration over silos.
- Experience with fraud detection systems and risk modeling.
- Background in Fintech, Property PropTech, or Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS).
About AppFolio
AppFolio is the technology leader powering the future of the real estate industry. Our innovative platform and trusted partnership enable our customers to connect communities, increase operational efficiency, and grow their business. For more information about AppFolio, visit appfolio.com.
Why AppFolio
Grow | We enable a culture of high performance, where delivering results is recognized by opportunities for growth and compelling total rewards. Our challenging and meaningful work drive the growth of our business, and ourselves.
Learn | We partner with you to realize your potential by investing in you from the start. We're cultivating a team of big thinkers through coaching and mentorship with our best-in-class leaders, and giving you the time and tools to develop your skills.
Impact | We are creating a world where living in, investing in, managing, and supporting communities feels magical and effortless, freeing people to thrive. We do this by innovating with purpose while cultivating a culture of impact. We learn as much from each other as we do our customers and our communities.
Connect | We excel at hybrid work by fostering an environment that feels flexible, personal and connected, no matter where we are. We create space to fuel innovation and collaboration, and we come together to celebrate, connect, and succeed.
Paddle as One.
Learn more at appfolio.com/company/careers
Statement of Equal Opportunity
At AppFolio, we value diversity in backgrounds and perspectives and depend on it to drive our innovative culture. That’s why we’re a proud Equal Opportunity Employer, and we believe that our products, our teams, and our business are stronger because of it. This means that no matter what race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identification, national origin, age, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, or veteran status, you’re always welcome at AppFolio.