Candescent is a forward-thinking technology company transforming how financial institutions deliver Intelligent Banking experiences. We unite digital banking, account opening, and branch solutions that power and connect digital banking, account opening, and branch solutions-creating seamless engagement across digital, remote, and in-person channels.
Our Experience-Led, Intelligence-Driven approach combines human-centered design with data, automation, and cloud-based innovation. Built on an API-first architecture, our extensible ecosystem enables institutions to adapt quickly, integrate easily, and unlock new opportunities for growth-turning every customer interaction into a moment of clarity, confidence, and connection.
Director of Engineering, Mobile PlatformYou thrive in environments where the platform is the product where reliability, developer experience, and extensibility are core features. You're comfortable navigating build-vs-buy decisions, managing technical debt alongside new capabilities, and communicating tradeoffs clearly to executive leadership.
The OpportunityCandescent is seeking a
Director of Engineering, Mobile Platform to lead the evolution of the application foundation that powers our consumer digital banking experience today and will expand into business and commercial banking. This is not a narrow mobile role: you will own the cross-cutting platform layer that underpins both mobile and web applications.
You will guide the architecture, reliability, and developer experience for the application foundation covering instrumentation, authentication, observability, error handling, logging, telemetry, and plugin infrastructure that product teams rely on to build and ship features.
Key Areas of ResponsibilityPlatform Architecture & Extensibility- Design and evolve extensibility surfaces including public/internal APIs, event-driven interfaces, webhooks, and plugin endpoints that enable integrations and custom applications.
- Develop resilient, production-grade services using modern service frameworks and proven reliability patterns (e.g., retries, circuit breaking, graceful degradation).
- Own the full API lifecycle: requirements, design, implementation, versioning, backward compatibility, and deprecation strategy.
- Lead gateway engineering: authentication/authorization policies, rate limiting, traffic shaping, caching, and progressive deployment strategies.
Reliability, Observability & Performance- Define and enforce performance and reliability standards across services and APIs, including latency, throughput, error budgets, and SLA/SLO adherence.
- Integrate performance and reliability testing into CI/CD workflows.
- Establish comprehensive observability practices: structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing, and real-time monitoring.
- Drive proactive incident prevention and root-cause analysis through data and instrumentation.
Application Foundation & Developer Experience- Own instrumentation, error handling, logging, and telemetry across mobile and web surfaces.
- Lead the evolution of authentication and identity frameworks supporting consumer, business, and future commercial banking users.
- Build and maintain the observability stack and performance analytics for the application layer.
- Develop plugin architecture and scaffolding that enables product teams to build independently and ship faster.
- Deliver high-quality developer documentation, API collections, sandbox environments, and SDKs that reduce time-to-first-call.
Cross-Platform Product Expansion- Define the platform strategy as Candescent expands from consumer into business and commercial banking.
- Ensure the application foundation supports both native mobile and web delivery models.
- Partner with Product, Design, and peer engineering leaders to define the technical roadmap and API contracts.
- Lead the transition from monolithic patterns to modular, plugin-driven architecture.
Global Team Leadership & Scaling- Lead team and engineering managers and their teams across North America, India, and Serbia. Team size 50-70 employees.
- Scale the organization while maintaining velocity, quality, and a strong engineering culture.
- Establish engineering standards, development workflows, and delivery cadences optimized for distributed teams.
- Foster a culture of ownership, technical excellence, and continuous improvement.
Required Experience- Bachelor's degree in Engineering or equivalent work experience.
- 8+ years of hands-on experience building and operating production services using modern service frameworks.
- Experience with mobile and/or web application development from 0 1, with strong architectural instincts.
- Deep expertise in API design, lifecycle management, and platform engineering at scale.
- Experience working with full stack and React Native.
- Proven success leading and scaling globally distributed engineering organizations.
- Strong understanding of authentication/authorization protocols and security best practices.
- Experience operating API gateways and managing traffic and security policies.
- Demonstrated ability to establish observability practices and drive reliability improvements.
- Must be legally authorized to work in the U.S. without sponsorship.
Preferred Qualifications- Experience in digital banking, payments, lending, or other regulated FinTech domains.
- Background in platform-as-a-product models, including internal developer experience, SDK design, and self-service tooling.
- Experience in PE-backed or high-growth environments undergoing rapid transformation.
Statement to Third Party AgenciesTo ALL recruitment agencies: Candescent only accepts resumes from agencies on the preferred supplier list. Please do not forward resumes to our applicant tracking system, Candescent employees, or any Candescent facility. Candescent is not responsible for any fees or charges associated with unsolicited resumes.
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