Director Engineering

Nashville, TN | Full-Time | Reports to CTO

The Role

Wealth Access is hiring a Director of Engineering to lead engineering execution across our application platform, data pipelines, reliability, and AI-enabled product initiatives.
You'll report to the CTO and own delivery, people management, and organizational structure across a .NET/C#, Python, SQL Server, AWS, and React stack that serves some of the largest banks and wealth management firms in the country. If you want to inherit a finished org, this isn't the role. If you want to build one, it is. You're energized by moving fast, making hard calls, and seeing your impact immediately.

This is an execution-focused leadership role. You'll partner closely with the CTO on technical direction and platform modernization while owning engineering operating cadence, cross-team delivery, and execution accountability across the full engineering organization. Our team has grown from 2 to 20 engineers in two years across Platform, UX, and SRE, and we expect to continue growing. The management layer, delivery systems, and engineering culture are being built right now - not inherited from someone else.

Wealth Access is a connected intelligence platform that integrates data from 50+ financial source systems into a unified client record, powering wealth management, digital banking, analytics, and AI-driven advisor experiences for leading financial institutions. We're actively shipping an AI intelligence layer built on AWS Bedrock, and the engineering team needs a dedicated leader who can translate ambition into disciplined execution.

What You'll Do

Engineering Leadership & Execution

• Own engineering execution across backend, frontend, data pipeline, platform, and reliability workstreams - setting commitments, managing dependencies, and ensuring predictable, high-quality releases

• Partner with Product, Program Management, and engineering leaders to manage trade-offs, sequencing, and client-facing delivery timelines

• Establish delivery cadence metrics - velocity, cycle time, release frequency - and use them to continuously improve throughput and accountability

• Serve as the primary execution leader for engineering, ensuring risks are surfaced early and teams stay aligned on priorities

People Leadership & Organizational Scaling

• Directly manage engineering managers, team leads, staff engineers, and senior technical leaders across the organization

• Strengthen the management layer through coaching, performance management, and clear expectations for leadership effectiveness

• Lead hiring and org design as the company grows - adding management depth where it creates leverage without creating bureaucracy

• Foster a culture of ownership, urgency, quality, and continuous improvement where engineers take pride in what they ship

Technical Partnership

• Partner with the CTO on technical strategy, modernization priorities, and architectural execution

• Bring enough technical depth to evaluate plans, challenge weak assumptions, and guide teams toward sound decisions

• Reinforce strong engineering practices across code review, testing, CI/CD, release readiness, and technical debt management

AI Enablement

• Champion the adoption of AI-assisted development practices across engineering - evaluating tools, setting guardrails for AI-generated code in a regulated environment, and coaching engineers on effective, responsible use

• Measure productivity impact from AI tooling and drive continuous improvement in how teams leverage these capabilities

• Partner with the CTO to ensure the engineering organization is equipped to support AI-enabled product development as that area expands

Cross-Functional Leadership

• Represent engineering in executive planning and client-facing conversations where engineering commitments are business commitments

• Partner with Client Success, Implementations, and Product to align engineering capacity with delivery realities and business priorities

Who You Are

Must-Have

• 8+ years of software engineering experience
• 2+ years of experience leading engineering teams
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and building systems where none exist yet - you've scaled a team through a growth inflection, not inherited a mature org

• Proven success leading multi-team engineering execution across multiple concurrent workstreams, with a track record of improving delivery predictability and scaling organizations through growth

• Deep technical proficiency across our core stack - .NET/C#, Python, SQL Server, AWS, and React. You've built and scaled production systems on this stack, can review code across the full stack, and can challenge technical decisions with credibility

• Demonstrated experience with AI-assisted software development tools and practices - you've used tools like GitHub Copilot, Claude, or Cursor to ship software and can coach a team on effective, responsible adoption

• Strong people leadership skills - hiring, coaching, performance management, and developing engineers into technical leaders

• Clear communicator who translates engineering complexity into concrete plans, risks, and decisions for non-technical stakeholders

Strong Preference

• Experience with enterprise B2B SaaS platforms involving data integration, ETL/ELT pipelines, or complex system interoperability

• Experience in financial services, fintech, wealthtech, banking technology, or another regulated industry

• Familiarity with AI-enabled product development, including LLM-powered features, RAG architectures, or vector search in production environments

• Nashville-based or willing to relocate is preferred - right person matters more than zip code, but all things equal we'll take the Nashville candidate every time

Compensation

Compensation includes a competitive base salary, bonus, and equity participation, along with comprehensive benefits: flexible PTO, company-funded HSA, 401(k) with match, and paid downtown Nashville parking. The final package will reflect experience, qualifications, and market conditions.