Senior Vice President of Engineering

About this role

At Koalafi, we believe in a world where no one has to put an important purchase on hold. That’s why we’re making it easier for more people to pay for big purchases over time.

Retailers across the country rely on us to offer flexible lease-to-own financing to their non-prime consumers, while increasing sales and strengthening customer loyalty. Their 2M+ customers love us because we provide a flexible way for them to make payments and give them an opportunity to improve their credit. Our 200+ Koalafi teammates enjoy inspiring and challenging work that accelerates their careers.

Interested in learning more about how we’re transforming the financing experience and joining our team?

The Opportunity

We’re looking for a Senior Vice President of Engineering to lead Koalafi’s entire engineering organization, including our Consumer and Merchant Experience, Core Engineering, and Application Experience groups, as well as our Data & AI Platform and Architecture functions.

Reporting to the Chief Product and Technology Officer, you will partner closely with the CPTO and Head of Product to set engineering direction, translate company priorities into execution, and build an organization that delivers meaningful business results. Your scope spans the platforms, applications, services, and data infrastructure that power our customer experiences, merchant relationships, and internal operations.

This is a company leadership role, not solely an engineering leadership role. You will help shape business decisions, influence across functions, and bring a clear perspective on how technology can support growth, improve efficiency, and strengthen the customer experience. You must be equally credible in a technical discussion with engineers and a strategic discussion with the executive team or the board—and move comfortably between those two modes.

We’re also looking for an active AI practitioner who will help evolve how Koalafi works. You should be building and experimenting with AI tools yourself, with a thoughtful perspective on how to apply them across engineering and the broader business. The goal is not simply to increase adoption of tools or token usage, but to drive real, measurable business outcomes by embracing a willingness to fundamentally change how the business operates. You will lead this transformation through practical application, sound judgment, and measurable results.

What You’ll Do

Set engineering direction and own execution

Partner with the CPTO, Head of Product, and cross-functional leaders to translate company objectives into a clear engineering strategy, investment priorities, and execution plans. Ensure teams understand the outcomes they are accountable for, make realistic commitments, and surface risks and tradeoffs early. Own the engineering response when delivery is at risk, aligning leaders on corrective action and following through.

Lead as a business executive

Build strong partnerships across Product, Risk, Operations, Finance, Sales, and other functions. Contribute to company decisions beyond engineering, connecting technical choices to growth, customer experience, operating efficiency, and risk. Communicate complex topics clearly and bring well-vetted recommendations – not simply issues or requests – to executive discussions.

Apply technical depth with sound leadership judgment

Earn the team’s trust through technical expertise, thoughtful questions, and the ability to engage deeply in consequential architectural and engineering decisions. Recognize when an initiative, technical risk, or team challenge needs your direct involvement, and engage early enough to make a difference. Balance that involvement with clear delegation, strengthening your leaders’ ownership rather than becoming a bottleneck or doing their jobs for them.

Build and develop a strong leadership team

Lead, coach, and hold accountable engineering leaders and managers across the organization. Set clear expectations for their technical judgment, business understanding, people leadership, and execution. Invest in succession planning, leadership development, and hiring, while addressing performance gaps directly. Continually evaluate team structure, responsibilities, and leadership capacity so the organization can operate effectively as priorities evolve.

Own architecture, data foundations, and pragmatic modernization

Guide the evolution of our applications, core services, and data platforms, balancing near-term delivery with long-term maintainability, reliability, and scale. Modernize the tech stack where it creates clear business value and be able to defend the ROI. Partner with Risk, Analytics, and Data Science to ensure our data engineering and AI foundations support reliable access, clear ownership, and effective use of data across the company.

Drive engineering excellence and responsible investment

Strengthen quality, test automation, delivery practices, observability, and operational readiness. Establish useful measures of delivery effectiveness, reliability, cost, and business impact, and use them to guide improvement. Own engineering budget and capacity planning in partnership with the CPTO and Finance, challenging staffing and technology proposals against business needs and credible alternatives. Partner closely with IT and Information Security to build and operate secure, resilient systems.

Lead AI adoption through hands-on practice

Maintain an active practice of building, prototyping, and experimenting with AI tools yourself. Use that experience to help teams improve how they design, build, test, deploy, and operate software—not just how they write code. Stay current with emerging capabilities, distinguish useful advances from hype, and turn promising experiments into repeatable practices with measurable improvements in speed, quality, or capacity, with the ultimate goal being to drive better business outcomes for the company.

Help the broader company work more effectively through…