Director, Engineering

About Blackhawk Network

Today, through BHN’s single global platform, businesses of all kinds can tap into the world’s largest network of branded payment solutions. BHN helps businesses grow revenue, increase loyalty, motivate and reward their teams, disburse funds and engage consumers. Branded payment solutions include the issuance and distribution of gift cards, egifts, corporate payouts and rewards, along with the technology to deliver these products in seamless, integrated ways. BHN’s network spans the globe with more than 400,000 consumer touchpoints. Learn more at BHN.com.

 

Hybrid flexibility: At Blackhawk Network, you’ll enjoy the best of both worlds—focused remote work plus in-person collaboration on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, our regular in-office days at our Pleasanton headquarters. This rhythm gives you the tools, connection, and autonomy you need to make a real impact.

Overview

In Financial Transactions group, we focus on high transaction volume combined with low latency to give the highest performing financial network that is possible. This role will focus on modernizing our core financial switch and routing capabilities; enabling network growth through modern API development; focus on detail for proprietary network controls, issuance capabilities, and the best-in-class fraud and risk systems.

 

Global reach requires a global role. This role will have teams and partnerships all over the world. We are the network that enables stored value transactions to occur everywhere customers want to interact with our brands. We enable stored value products and money-movement across all currencies and denominations. We bring state-of-the-art products to the hands of millions of customers. 

 

Customer first, Technology second. We focus on always-on infrastructure, prioritizing customer access to their funds over everything, helping drive our zero-impact delivery goals. 

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a team of engineers through a leadership team, setting clear expectations, fostering growth, and building a culture of accountability and collaboration. 
• Partner closely with your peer Engineering Leaders, Lead Engineers, Product Management, and Technical Program Managers to align roadmaps and deliver cross-functional outcomes. 
• Champion talent development — hiring, mentoring, performance management, and succession planning across your organization. 
• Serve as a visible technical leader within BHN's broader Product & Technology organization, contributing to architecture forums, cross-team initiatives, and engineering culture. 

 

Technical Strategy & Platform Ownership 

 

• Help steer the technical direction for large-scale distributed backend systems 
• Drive platform modernization — evolving from monolithic or legacy patterns toward API-first, cloud-native architectures on AWS. 
• Establish and enforce engineering best practices: API design standards, code quality, CI/CD pipelines, observability, incident response, and post-mortem culture. 
• Accountable for platform reliability, scalability, performance, and security across production systems that process high transaction volumes. 

Security & Compliance Leadership 

 

• Ensure all platform solutions meet PCI-DSS, enterprise security, and regulatory requirements including tokenization, sandboxed architectures, and access controls. 
• Partner with Payments+, Fraud/Risk, and InfoSec teams to proactively identify and remediate security and compliance risks. 

Operational Excellence 

 

• Define and track meaningful engineering metrics — velocity, quality, uptime, and team health — and use data to drive continuous improvement. 
• Build repeatable processes for onboarding, knowledge management, and operational runbooks that scale with team growth. 

Manage competing priorities effectively in a fast-paced environment, balancing near-term delivery with long-term platform investment 

Qualifications

Experience 

 

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years in engineering leadership roles of increasing scope 
• Proven experience managing managers — building and developing teams through other leaders 
• Background in payments, fintech, e-commerce, or high-transaction-volume platforms strongly preferred 
• Track record of delivering large-scale distributed systems to production with high availability requirements 
• 5+ years working in Agile environments with geographically distributed teams 

 

Technical Skills 

 

• Deep expertise in Java (11+), Spring Boot, and distributed systems design 
• Strong command of API design (REST/GraphQL), microservices, and event-driven architecture 
• Cloud-native development and operations on AWS 
• RDBMS, SQL, data design, and transactionality (ACID); familiarity with NoSQL 
• PCI-DSS compliance, tokenization, and security architecture 
• Observability tooling (New Relic, Splunk, or equivalent) and CI/CD pipeline ownership 
• Familiarity with service mesh, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and infrastructure-as-code 

 

Leadership & Communication 

 

• Strong communication and cross-team collaboration skills 
• Experience mentoring engineers and driving technical decision-making across teams 
• Proven ability to balance technical excellence with business requirements and delivery timelines 
• Track record of successful cross-functional collaboration in fast-paced environments 
• Ability to translate ambiguous business goals into clear technical direction and measurable outcomes  

 

Mindset 

 

• Systems thinking approach to complex technical challenges 
• Customer-focused mindset with understanding of user experience implications 
• Data-driven decision making and commitment to measurable results
• Passion for building scalable, secure, and maintainable solutions 

We seek candidates who not only demonstrate curiosity and adaptability in emerging technologies but have also successfully implemented and utilized AI tools to enhance their work, improve processes, or deliver measurable results.  Our teams embrace continuous learning and the thoughtful integration of AI to create meaningful impact – for our employees and the future of work.

Benefits

Salary Range for California Residents Only: $222,120.00 to $310,980.00

 

Pay is based on several factors including but not limited to education, work experience, certifications, etc. In addition to your salary, Blackhawk Network offers benefits including 401k with employer match, medical, dental, vision, 12 paid holidays in the year 2026, 1 hour of sick pay accrual for every 30 hours worked, parental leave, life insurance, disability insurance, accident and illness insurance, health and dependent care flexible spending accounts, wellness benefits, and flexible time off for all full-time employees. 

EEO Statement

Blackhawk Network provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.  Blackhawk Network believes that diversity leads to strength. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training.

 

Blackhawk Network encourages applicants with previous criminal records to apply to all positions and, pursuant to the San Francisco and Los Angeles Fair Chance Acts (and other “Fair Chance” laws), Blackhawk Network will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.  For Philadelphia applicants or jobs, please see a copy of Philadelphia’s ordinance on this topic by clicking this link: https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/philadelphia/latest/philadelphia_pa/0-0-0-280104.