Senior Engineering Manager

Accertify enables commerce by doing one thing extraordinarily well: pinpointing fraud. The company's Predictive Yes Platform helps businesses say yes to more - more good customers, more revenue, and more growth - without getting burned. It's a precise, confident, data-backed yes, made possible by joining signals across the entire customer lifecycle through unmatched data volume, layered AI-powered models, and a consortium approach that protects clients from bad actors spotted anywhere in the network while unlocking business with good actors verified anywhere in the network. With more than 10 billion transactions and over $1 trillion in commerce processed in 2025 alone, Accertify delivers the intelligence and precision that fraud and payments teams need to say yes confidently and enable growth. That's the More Yes difference. We're looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead Core Services - the team that owns Vertigo and every third-party integration Accertify runs, including Auth0, Shopify, and Salesforce. You'll own both halves of the Engineering Manager role - the people on your team and the technical strategy behind what they build. With a team of 4–5 engineers, this is hands-on leadership, not a layer of management. You'll be in the design conversations, close to how each integration actually works, and accountable for your swim lane's delivery end to end - including when the blocker sits in another team. The role also carries a dimension most swim lanes don't. Several of our integrations are delivered with outside vendors, so you'll set the technical expectations for partner-delivered work, hold it to Accertify's standards, and own the transition into something your team can run and support itself.

As part of the team, you will:

• Lead and manage a team of 4–5 engineers - 1:1s, career development, performance, and hiring - and build depth so that no integration depends on a single person
• Own end-to-end engineering delivery for Vertigo and the third-party integration portfolio, across concurrent workstreams moving at different paces
• Own the architectural direction of Vertigo and the integration platform, and the technical design behind what Product requests
• Drive integration architecture decisions - API contracts, authentication, webhooks, versioning, and resilience to third-party change
• Set technical expectations for vendor-delivered work, review deliverables against our standards, and own the handoff into internal ownership
• Establish and enforce engineering standards, coding practices, and quality governance, automating quality processes rather than policing them manually
• Own availability, monitoring, alerting, incident response, and on-call practice for the team's services, including how the team learns that a partner's API has changed
• Partner with Product as a full peer - not a coordinator or a relay - in honest, ongoing conversation about scope, sequencing, and tradeoffs
• Work with the QA Engineering Manager on test strategy, coverage, and release readiness, and prepare the team for release with an engineering readiness recommendation
• Partner with Architecture, the Implementation team, and external vendors, and communicate technical strategy and tradeoffs clearly to senior leadership
• Make decisions within your swim lane and escalate to the Engineering Director where scope, release risk, client or compliance impact, shared-resource contention, or capacity risk requires it - bringing a recommendation and the tradeoffs, not just the problem
• Coach and develop engineers through structured mentorship, career planning, and succession planning
• Lead modernization and improvement efforts across the platform, including team norms for AI-assisted development and code review

Required Skills/Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including demonstrated experience leading engineering teams in a people management capacity
• Strong system design background, with experience architecting and operating distributed systems in production
• Hands-on experience with third-party and partner integrations - API contracts, authentication, webhooks, and versioning
• Experience managing delivery across multiple parallel projects or workstreams, with real delegation rather than personal heroics
• Technical depth sufficient to lead a design review, read a pull request, and set coding standards the team will actually follow
• Experienced user of AI tools for software development and other SDLC processes.
• Proven ability to balance business priorities against technical trade-offs and deliver against complex roadmaps
• Ability to lead technical decisions through disagreement - building alignment where you can, making the call where you can't, and being clear about which is happening
• Communication strong enough to influence senior leadership and external partners as well as engineers

Desired Skills:

• Experience working with external vendors, contractors, or implementation partners, including managing the transition to internal ownership
• Familiarity with Vertigo or other Accertify platform components
• Experience with identity, authentication, e-commerce, or CRM integrations (Auth0, Shopify, Salesforce, or equivalents)
• Prior experience in fraud prevention, payments, or real-time decisioning systems
• Experience building test and staging environments for systems dependent on third-party platforms
• Experience driving platform modernization or migration initiatives
• Java and Spring background, or a comparable enterprise ecosystem
• Comfort setting team norms for AI-assisted development and code review

Additional Details:

• This is a hybrid role based in our Itasca, IL office, with a mix of in-office and remote work.