Engineering Manager, Unified API

About the role

StraitsX is looking for an experienced Engineering Manager to lead its Unified API group, which oversees two teams responsible for core payment APIs, blockchain infrastructure and agentic payment solutions. The role leads engineers and an Engineering Manager, drives technical strategy, engineering delivery and system reliability, and helps shape the backend architecture as the company embraces AI-native software development.

Key responsibilities

• Lead and develop engineering teams for payment APIs, blockchain and agentic payments; manage and mentor engineers and an Engineering Manager.
• Oversee delivery across teams, balancing priorities, resources, timelines and technical trade-offs, and drive talent development through coaching, performance management and hiring.
• Ensure production reliability through monitoring, incident management and continuous improvement.
• Drive adoption of AI coding agents across design, implementation, testing, debugging and code reviews, and champion specification-driven development with acceptance criteria and automated tests.
• Establish AI verification and evaluation practices, including automated testing, evaluation frameworks and human review, with appropriate security controls.
• Lead architectural discussions, technical design reviews and key engineering decisions, and set engineering standards for scalable, secure and maintainable backend systems.
• Define team objectives and OKRs aligned with the product roadmap, and work with Product, Compliance and other engineering leaders.

Required profile

• Proven experience managing software engineering teams in production backend environments, including leading or mentoring senior engineers.
• Around 7+ years of backend software engineering experience, including system architecture and technical design.
• Hands-on experience using AI coding agents, with familiarity with agent architectures, harnesses, context management, tool calling, Model Context Protocol (MCP) and verification of AI-generated work.
• Ability to lead complex projects, manage competing priorities and make sound technical and business trade-offs.
• Strong communication, stakeholder management and leadership skills, and proficiency in written and spoken English.

Nice-to-have qualifications

• Experience managing Engineering Managers or leading multiple teams.
• Experience with production AI-agent systems, agent harnesses or MCP servers.
• Familiarity with AI evaluation frameworks, adversarial testing or AI security risks such as prompt injection.
• Background in fintech, payment processing, digital banking or regulated financial services, and familiarity with stablecoins, blockchain infrastructure or protocols such as x402 and AP2.