Director, Engineering

About the Company

Blackhawk Network (BHN) powers the world’s largest network of branded payment solutions, enabling businesses to grow revenue, increase loyalty, motivate and reward teams, disburse funds, and engage consumers. BHN’s solutions include the issuance and distribution of gift cards, egifts, corporate payouts, and rewards, delivered through seamless, integrated technology. With over 400,000 consumer touchpoints globally, BHN enables stored value transactions and money movement across currencies and denominations, bringing state-of-the-art products to millions of customers.

BHN offers hybrid flexibility, combining remote work with in-office collaboration on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at the Pleasanton headquarters.

About the Role

Within the Financial Transactions group, this role focuses on modernizing BHN’s core financial switch and routing capabilities to support high transaction volumes with low latency. Responsibilities include enabling network growth through modern API development, enhancing proprietary network controls, issuance capabilities, and fraud/risk systems. This global role involves collaboration with teams and partners worldwide, ensuring always-on infrastructure and prioritizing customer access to funds.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a team of engineers through a leadership team, setting clear expectations, fostering growth, and building a culture of accountability and collaboration.
• Partner with peer Engineering Leaders, Lead Engineers, Product Management, and Technical Program Managers to align roadmaps and deliver cross-functional outcomes.
• Champion talent development, including hiring, mentoring, performance management, and succession planning.
• Serve as a visible technical leader within BHN’s broader Product & Technology organization, contributing to architecture forums, cross-team initiatives, and engineering culture.

Technical Strategy & Platform Ownership

• Steer the technical direction for large-scale distributed backend systems.
• Drive platform modernization toward API-first, cloud-native architectures on AWS.
• Establish and enforce engineering best practices: API design standards, code quality, CI/CD pipelines, observability, incident response, and post-mortem culture.
• Ensure platform reliability, scalability, performance, and security for high-transaction-volume production systems.

Security & Compliance Leadership

• Ensure all platform solutions meet PCI-DSS, enterprise security, and regulatory requirements, including tokenization, sandboxed architectures, and access controls.
• Partner with Payments+, Fraud/Risk, and InfoSec teams to proactively identify and remediate security and compliance risks.

Operational Excellence

• Define and track engineering metrics such as velocity, quality, uptime, and team health to drive continuous improvement.
• Build repeatable processes for onboarding, knowledge management, and operational runbooks that scale with team growth.
• Manage competing priorities in a fast-paced environment, balancing near-term delivery with long-term platform investment.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years in engineering leadership roles of increasing scope.
• Proven experience managing managers and developing teams through other leaders.
• Background in payments, fintech, e-commerce, or high-transaction-volume platforms strongly preferred.
• Track record of delivering large-scale distributed systems with high availability requirements.
• 5+ years working in Agile environments with geographically distributed teams.

Skills

• Technical: Deep expertise in Java (11+), Spring Boot, and distributed systems design; strong command of API design (REST/GraphQL), microservices, and event-driven architecture; cloud-native development and operations on AWS; RDBMS, SQL, data design, and transactionality (ACID); familiarity with NoSQL; PCI-DSS compliance, tokenization, and security architecture; observability tooling (New Relic, Splunk, or equivalent); CI/CD pipeline ownership; familiarity with service mesh, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and infrastructure-as-code.
• Leadership & Communication: Strong communication and cross-team collaboration skills; experience mentoring engineers and driving technical decision-making; ability to balance technical excellence with business requirements and delivery timelines; proven track record of cross-functional collaboration in fast-paced environments; ability to translate ambiguous business goals into clear technical direction and measurable outcomes.
• Mindset: Systems thinking approach to complex technical challenges; customer-focused mindset with understanding of user experience implications; data-driven decision making; commitment to measurable results; passion for building scalable, secure, and maintainable solutions; curiosity and adaptability in emerging technologies, including AI tools.

Benefits

• Salary Range for California Residents: $222,120.00 to $310,980.00 (based on education, work experience, certifications, etc.).
• 401k with employer match.
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• 12 paid holidays in 2026.
• 1 hour of sick pay accrual for every 30 hours worked.
• Parental leave.
• Life insurance, disability insurance, and accident/illness insurance.
• Health and dependent care flexible spending accounts.
• Wellness benefits.
• Flexible time off for all full-time employees.