Engineering Manager, Risk

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the Compliance team, within our Risk Infra group. The Risk Infra group builds the foundational systems that enable all of Melio's fraud and compliance defenses.

Join Melio's Compliance team to build the high-scale distributed systems that protect billions of dollars in transactions. You will lead a high-performing engineering squad that views Compliance not as a manual bottleneck, but as a cutting-edge technical engine for hyper-growth. By architecting mission-critical systems for automated KYC, AML, global sanctions screening, and policy enforcement, you'll directly enable the company to scale safely across global markets. This is a unique opportunity to tackle high-scale system complexities and apply GenAI to high-stakes regulatory landscapes where your code directly impacts the bottom line by mitigating financial risk and unlocking new revenue streams. We are looking for a visionary leader who views robust compliance as a competitive advantage and a world-class engineering challenge.

What you will do?

Lead and mentor a squad of backend engineers to deliver high-quality code, fostering a culture of technical excellence, rapid iteration, and end-to-end ownership. You will design low-latency, high-concurrency systems for sub-second risk assessments and automated decision-making, supporting hyper-growth without compromising regulatory needs or user experience.

Partner closely with Compliance analysts and governance experts to translate complex regulatory insights and global policies into resilient, fault-tolerant distributed logic. You will be responsible for balancing the immediate need for risk mitigation with long-term architectural scalability and stability.

Qualifications: 

• 5+ years of professional experience as a backend oriented software engineer.
• 3+ years experience managing a team of engineers.
• A deep understanding of production systems and the architecture of distributed systems.
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced, dynamic environment and adapting quickly to changing priorities.
• A reliable peer, with a strong sense of ownership, a can-do attitude and excellent collaboration and communication skills.
• A bar raiser, passionate for mentoring and personal growth processes.

Bonus points:

• Experience in the Fintech or Risk domain - especially compliance
• Experience with AWS infrastructure

A day in the life and how you'll make an impact:

A day in the life includes leading a team of backend engineers while staying hands-on with technical work. You'll collaborate with Product and Analytics and many other teams, groups and functions to define and deliver impactful projects, set goals and priorities, and ensure smooth execution of the roadmap. You'll also play a key role in hiring and team growth, supporting your engineers' development through mentorship and ongoing feedback. Along the way, you'll dive into Melio's fraud detection domain, helping shape the architecture and logic behind our decision systems.

About the Engineering department:

The Engineering department is the backbone of Melio. We build, scale, and maintain the technical infrastructure that processes over $100B in annual payments for small businesses nationwide.

Following our acquisition by Xero, we're tackling an even more exciting challenge: integrating Melio's payment platform with Xero's accounting software to create a unified financial ecosystem. This means building robust, scalable systems that seamlessly connect two powerful platforms while maintaining the security and reliability that financial services demand.

Our Stack:

We're all-in on AWS Serverless—meaning fully managed infrastructure that lets us build and scale faster than ever. We use TypeScript and Python for consistency, combining relational and document databases, and deploy via SAM CLI built on CloudFormation. Serverless gives us the agility to innovate rapidly while maintaining enterprise-grade reliability.

As part of our engineering team, you'll work on problems that matter: real-time payment processing, fraud prevention, API integrations, data synchronization, and user experience optimization. You'll have the autonomy to make architectural decisions, the support of a world-class team, and the satisfaction of seeing your code impact millions of small businesses.

If you're ready to build systems that scale, solve hard problems, and help small businesses thrive, we want to talk to you.

Read more about our Engineering department on our tech blog.

About Melio:

Melio, a Xero company, is revolutionizing how small businesses handle payments. By combining Melio's best-in-class bill pay platform with Xero's global accounting expertise, we're building the ultimate financial command center for American small businesses. We're the fastest-growing B2B payment solution in the US—but we're still small enough that you can make real, visible impact as we scale to reach millions more businesses.
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