About Betterment

Betterment is a leading, technology-driven financial services company that offers investing, savings and retirement solutions for retail investors and investment advisors as well as financial wellness solutions, including a 401(k) for small and medium-sized businesses. Our team is passionate about our mission, to empower people to build wealth with confidence and ease. We’re headquartered in NYC and offer hybrid NY-based positions (four days/ week in-office, with no required office days during the summer and winter holidays).

About the Role

As an Engineering Manager in Broker Dealer, you’ll lead a team building and evolving the backend systems that power Betterment’s trading and money movement infrastructure. This is a high-impact role in one of the most complex parts of our platform, where correctness, reliability, scale, and regulatory context all matter deeply.

Broker Dealer sits at the core of the Betterment platform. On a busy day, we securely move millions of dollars through our systems while ensuring every transaction flows through the right operational and risk checks to meet strict regulatory requirements. Every improvement in efficiency, quality, and decision-making in this area directly creates more value for our customers.

We’re looking for an engineering leader with strong people management fundamentals and strong technical judgment. You do not need to write production code every day to be successful in this role, but you do need to be technically credible: someone who can engage deeply in architecture and system design conversations, coach engineers through tradeoffs, raise the quality of code review discussions, and help a senior team make sound decisions in a complex domain. We also want someone who can help the team evolve how it works in an AI-enabled engineering environment, using new tools thoughtfully to increase leverage, improve decision quality, and maintain a high bar for correctness and craftsmanship.

This role will manage a team of individual contributors and partner closely with senior engineers, engineering managers, and cross-functional stakeholders across Product, Operations, Legal, and Compliance. It is especially well suited for someone who enjoys operating close to technical decisions, leading mature teams, and helping engineering organizations evolve how they work in a rapidly changing environment. This role is based out of our NYC office.

Below we’ve reflected the base salary range for this position. Actual salaries may vary depending on factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of Betterment’s total compensation package for employees.

New York City: $210,000–$245,000

This job may also be eligible for variable compensation in the form of a company incentive bonus.

A Day in the Life

• Manage a team of 6-8 backend engineers building trading technology that powers Betterment’s investing products.
• Foster career development and align roadmap opportunities with each engineer’s growth goals, while keeping them technically engaged and challenged.
• Lead a senior team with clear expectations, healthy accountability, and a team culture grounded in agility, ownership, constructive feedback, and shared success.
• Be a technically credible leader through thoughtful code review, system design feedback, architectural tradeoff discussions, and strong partnership with senior engineers.
• Balance the need for speed of delivery with the importance of correctness, resilience, maintainability, and quality in every project your team undertakes.
• Champion long-term system health by advocating for the stability, reliability, and operational soundness of the technology your team builds.
• Continuously improve team practices, engineering decision-making, and delivery effectiveness, including thoughtful use of AI-enabled tooling where it creates real leverage.
• Drive high-quality, practical AI adoption across the team's engineering workflows from design and code review to debugging, documentation, and delivery planning.
• Partner with senior engineers to create reusable internal prompts, playbooks, and domain-specific copilots that help the team move faster in a complex broker-dealer environment.
• Build deep domain knowledge in Broker Dealer systems and become a highly effective partner across engineering and business stakeholders.
• Collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, Operations, Legal, and Compliance teams to ensure we consistently deliver the right-sized solutions to the right problems.

What We’re Looking For

• 3+ years of experience directly managing software engineers in a formal engineering management role.
• 8+ years of experience building backend or distributed systems, ideally in complex, high-correctness environments.
• Strong technical judgment in software design, architecture, and code review.
• Experience leading or supporting senior engineers and helping high-performing teams continue to grow.
• A track record of ramping quickly in complex domains, closing knowledge gaps, and building trust across technical and cross-functional partners.
• Strong people management fundamentals, including coaching, feedback, performance management, and aligning engineers to meaningful work.
• Experience fostering accountability and ownership while helping teams deliver high-quality, right-sized solutions.
• Ability to adjust leadership style to meet the evolving needs of the team and the business.
• Strong collaboration skills across engineering teams, product managers, subject matter experts, non-technical stakeholders, and third-party vendors.
• Ability to translate business strategy and operational needs into engineering priorities that drive meaningful outcomes.
• Good judgment about where AI can meaningfully improve team effectiveness, and where human review, domain expertise, and engineering rigor should remain primary.
• Experience spotting repetitive, high-friction, or cognitively expensive team workflows and redesigning them with AI to create measurable leverage.

Nice to Have

• Experience in regulated systems, financial infrastructure, trading, custody, ledgers, money movement, or other high-reliability backend domains.
• Experience working with mature engineering teams where influence, judgment, and coaching matter as much as execution oversight.
• Experience experimenting with or adopting AI-enabled engineering practices to improve team effectiveness without lowering quality standards.
• Ability to distinguish between high-leverage AI use and low-quality generated output, and to guide engineers toward the former.