Engineering Manager, Fraud Prevention
About the role
Manages and leads a team of technical support staff who design, develop, test, implement, and monitor software and tools. Works with business leaders to define scope and requirements, and plans and executes the development of various systems. Acts as liaison with business sponsors and principals. ENGINEERING MANAGER FRAUD PREVENTION | DEBIT FRAUD INTEGRATION Vanguard | Fraud Prevention Technology ROLE Hands-on technical leader responsible for the engineering team that builds and operates Vanguard's fraud decisioning integration with our debit card processor. You will lead 3-6 engineers, own the technical delivery roadmap for the processor integration layer, and write code alongside your team. This role reports into the Fraud Prevention Technology program and partners closely with the Principal Engineer / Architect on technical direction. At Vanguard, we're on a mission to work for the long-term financial wellbeing of our clients, lead through product and services that transform our clients' lives, and learn and develop our skills as individuals and as a team. Vanguard has implemented a hybrid working model for the majority of our crew members, designed to capture the benefits of enhanced flexibility while enabling in-person learning, collaboration, and connection.
Responsibilities
- Lead a team of 3-6 engineers building real-time fraud decisioning services that sit in the debit authorization path
- Own the integration layer between Vanguard's fraud platform and the debit processor (webhook handling, auth-time enrichment, response orchestration)
- Translate architectural direction into executable sprints, technical designs, and working software
- Write production code—expect to spend 40-60% of your time hands-on in the codebase
- Drive engineering quality: code reviews, testing strategy, incident response, and on-call practices
- Manage team health: hiring, career development, 1:1s, performance management
- Partner with the processor's technical team on API contracts, certification, and production readiness
- Ensure the team meets the latency, reliability, and compliance requirements inherent to payment authorization
Qualifications
- 8+ years in software engineering with 2+ years in a tech lead or engineering management role
- Strong proficiency in Node.js; working familiarity with Java
- Experience building low-latency, high-availability services—ideally in a payments, banking, or financial services context
- Demonstrated ability to balance technical leadership with people management
- Experience integrating with third-party processors or financial service providers (REST/gRPC APIs, webhook-driven auth flows)
- Familiarity with ETL pipelines and feature engineering workflows for ML/analytics
- Comfort with AI-assisted development practices and tooling
Skills
- Direct experience with debit/credit card processor integrations (Marqeta, Galileo, TSYS, Fiserv, or similar)
- Familiarity with payment processing concepts (ISO 8583, authorization flows, network settlement)
- Background in fraud prevention or risk systems
- Experience operating services under strict SLA requirements (sub-100ms p99 latency, 99.99% uptime)
- Familiarity with streaming platforms (Kafka, Kinesis) and feature stores
- Experience with analytics infrastructure (Redshift, Athena, or similar columnar/query engines)