Engineering Manager, Processing

Lithic is the modern card issuing and processing platform empowering ambitious financial companies to build the future of payments. Our infrastructure powers card programs for 100+ innovative clients, from fintechs reimagining credit and digital banking to platforms transforming disbursements and spend management. Companies like Mercury, Flex, and Novo rely on Lithic's developer-friendly APIs, direct network connections, and flawless reconciliation to launch and scale card programs in weeks, not years. We're building a future where access to better financial products materially improves people's lives, free from the constraints of 30-year-old mainframes and legacy processors. We're proud to be backed by world-class investors who share that vision, including Bessemer Venture Partners, Index Ventures, Spark Capital, Stripes, and Mastercard, along with many others. We're a team of 170+ across 26 states and 7 countries, headquartered in New York City. We are hiring an Engineering Manager for our Processing team to lead Lithic's next phase of growth. The Processing team builds and maintains the real-time interfaces between Lithic and external payment networks. Every card authorization, clearing message, and settlement file flows through systems this team owns. The team manages both online and batch transaction flows across Mastercard, Visa, and Amex, along with transaction enrichment, disputes processing, and network compliance. The systems we maintain have strict latency and uptime requirements, because they sit on the critical path for every card transaction. The team also manages the physical network peering with card network partners, so infrastructure and networking expertise are important. The team primarily uses Java, Python, and Kotlin on AWS. What You'll Do: Ensure high reliability, low latency, and correctness for Lithic's transaction processing interfaces and related services Lead delivery of new capabilities across authorization, clearing/settlement, disputes, and network integration surfaces Own and evolve the infrastructure supporting physical network peering with card network partners, ensuring connectivity, failover, and capacity meet reliability requirements Raise the bar on operational excellence: observability, incident response, on-call readiness, and pragmatic reliability improvements Own initiatives from planning to launch, keeping stakeholders informed and aligned along the way Partner closely with Product and cross-functional stakeholders to clarify requirements early and keep engineering time focused on the highest-impact work Lead efforts to improve systems, processes, and documentation so new team members can ramp quickly Participate in and help evolve the team's on-call rotation What You Bring Experience managing and growing engineers, including coaching, feedback, and hiring Strong technical judgment and system design skills, especially for low-latency, high-availability systems, with solid networking and infrastructure knowledge Comfort staying close to the work — this is a player-coach role where the manager can unblock, review designs, and occasionally contribute hands-on when needed Experience shipping and operating production services with strict uptime and latency requirements Experience with or interest in network infrastructure — peering, connectivity, failover, and capacity planning for external partner integrations Experience with or interest in learning payment processing — card network protocols, authorization flows, clearing/settlement, or similar domains Experience with Java, Python, or Kotlin and AWS (or closely related stacks), and an ability to ramp quickly where the stack is unfamiliar Strong cross-functional communication skills and an ability to keep teams aligned under time pressure Growth mindset and continuous desire to learn and improve An interest in fintech and payments is preferred The annual Canadian salary range for this role is CA$232,000 - $333,000 plus equity. This salary