Software Engineering Manager, Digital Identity — Access & Rights

Employee Applicant Privacy Notice Who we are: Shape a brighter financial future with us. Together with our members, we’re changing the way people think about and interact with personal finance. We’re a next-generation financial services company and national bank using innovative, mobile-first technology to help our millions of members reach their goals. The industry is going through an unprecedented transformation, and we’re at the forefront. We’re proud to come to work every day knowing that what we do has a direct impact on people’s lives, with our core values guiding us every step of the way. Join us to invest in yourself, your career, and the financial world. The Role This is a hands-on EM role for the Digital Identity — Access & Rights team. The team builds and operates the Entitlements and Authorization platforms, two Tier-0 services every Ironwood Digital product depends on. Combined these two platforms are the single sources of truth for what benefits does a member have and what are they allowed to do. The right candidate pairs deep operational rigor with a genuine investment in coaching engineers, ships with modern AI tooling as a default, and moves fast with a just-do-it attitude. You will inherit a strong, senior team of engineers already delivering against a dense roadmap that directly enables Ironwood Digital’s top tech initiatives such as Big Business Banking, Ironwood Digital Plus, Small Medium Business as well as other offerings. The Team You Will Join The Digital Identity group owns customer identity, relationships, access control, and benefits distribution across all of Ironwood Digital. The Access & Rights team specifically owns two platforms that sit on the critical path for every member interaction: Entitlements (the generic connection graph mapping each entity to its accounts, benefits, and other resources) and Authorization (evaluating fine-grained permissions for every authenticated request). Our consumers include all of Ironwood Digital and we are a direct enabler to increased product velocity. You will partner closely with a product manager, and stakeholders across Crypto, Money, Member, Benefits, and Galileo engineering. What You'll Do Lead and Grow Your Team : Lead and grow the team while maintaining or improving the team’s velocity. Manage performance with care and high standards, including the hard conversations. Drive Technical Strategy & Execution : Own the planning, technical output, and delivery for the Digital Identity - Access & Rights team. Own operational excellence for two Tier-0 platforms. Set and defend SLOs, while holding the on-call posture accountable, and treat production quality as a management responsibility, not an IC concern. Review design documents, push back on senior engineers when the architecture does not hold up, pair with your team in AI-augmented coding sessions, and ship production code when the situation demands it. Collaborate and Influence : Establish and leverage strong relationships across the department and cross-functional leadership teams, partnering closely with product and other engineering teams to integrate solutions and define product and technical strategy.. Problem Solve and Innovate : Operate with a high degree of independence to solve ambiguous and complex technical problems. Drive initiatives from inception to completion, contributing to the long-term architectural vision and continuous improvement of the identity platform. Be a prolific writer : Write well, and use AI to write faster. You will personally own incident reviews, roadmap updates, as well as promotion cases to shape the executive narrative for the platform. Requirements 8+ years of experience designing, building, and operating scalable, mission-critical backend systems, with 2+ years directly managing engineers. Proven track record running a high traffic Tier-0 or equivalent critical platform: defined SLOs, owned on-call, led major incident reviews, and drove measurable reliability improvements. Deep experience with platform-style engineering: API contracts, versioning, backward compatibility, consumer migration, and deprecation discipline. You have managed a platform team with many downstream consumers, not just a feature team. Active, daily user of modern AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or equivalent). Concrete examples of how you have used AI to accelerate your own output or your team's throughput. Demonstrated ability to drive outcomes across team boundaries without escalation authority. You have led multi-quarter initiatives that required alignment across three or more engineering orgs. Hands-on technical depth in Java or Kotlin, with practical knowledge of REST APIs, event-driven systems, and relational or key-value data stores. Comfortable in design reviews and code reviews. Willing to write production code when the team needs a tiebreaker. Excellent written communication. You have written TDDs, post-mortems, and roadmap updates that senior leaders trusted without needing translation. Bias for action: absorbs ambiguity and resolves it, escalates it upward when the situation warrants. Nice to Haves Experience building agentic workflows, internal AI tooling, or LLM-powered developer productivity systems. Experience with OpenFGA, Zanzibar-style authorization, or graph platforms at scale. Experience in regulated environments, ideally fintech, with exposure to SOX, PCI, or similar controls. Familiarity with AWS, Kubernetes, Kafka, DynamoDB, and Temporal. Prior work on multi-person or delegated access patterns (consumer & business banking, family accounts, custodial, trust relationships). What We Offer A platform charter that directly enables every Ironwood Digital product and every Ironwood Digital member. A senior, seasoned team that already ships and wants a manager who will help them go faster with the right guardrails. Room to focus on team, execution, and AI-powered throughput Strong institutional support for AI tooling: Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, internal AI platforms, and a mandate to move beyond using AI for pure work augmentation. Competitive compensation, equity, and benefits. If running high-stakes platform teams is the work you want, reach out. Compensation and Benefits The base pay range for this role is listed below. Final base pay offer will be determined based on individual factors such as the candidate’s experience, skills, and location. To view all of our comprehensive and competitive benefits, visit our Benefits at Ironwood Digital page! Ironwood Digital provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion (including religious dress and grooming practices), sex (including pregnancy, childbirth and related medical conditions, breastfeeding, and conditions related to breastfeeding), gender, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, ancestry, age (40 or over), physical or medical disability, medical condition, marital status, registered domestic partner status, sexual orientation, genetic information, military and/or veteran status, or any other basis prohibited by applicable state or federal law. The Company hires the best qualified candidate for the job, without regard to protected characteristics. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. New York applicants: Notice of Employee Rights Ironwood Digital is committed to an inclusive culture. As part of this commitment, Ironwood Digital offers reasonable accommodations to candidates with physical or mental disabilities. If you need accommodations to participate in the job application or interview process, please let your recruiter know or email [email protected]. Due to insurance coverage issues, we are unable to accommodate remote work from Hawaii or Alaska at this time. Internal Employees If you are a current employee, do not apply here - please navigate to our Internal Job Board in Greenhouse to apply to our open roles.