About the role
We're looking for a hands-on Staff Software Engineer to lead technology at an early-stage Fintech Wallet startup building a platform across fiat payments, crypto, wallets, and merchant payments. This is a hands-on leadership role where you'll own architecture, engineering, security, infrastructure, technical strategy, and team building. You'll work closely with the Founder, Product, Compliance, Risk, and Operations teams to build a secure, scalable, production-ready financial platform.
Responsibilities:
- Own the technology strategy, architecture, and engineering roadmap.
- Design and scale wallet, payments, ledger, transaction, and financial infrastructure.
- Build secure and reliable fiat + crypto systems.
- Lead engineering hiring, team structure, mentoring, and technical standards.
- Stay hands-on with architecture, coding, code reviews, debugging, and system design.
- Own cloud infrastructure, DevOps, CI/CD, reliability, and observability.
- Drive security across authentication, authorisation, encryption, key management, fraud controls, and auditability.
- Work with banks, payment providers, KYC/KYB, AML, custody, blockchain, and other third-party providers.
- Partner with Product and Founder on what to build and how to scale it.
- Make build-vs-buy decisions for critical technology components.
- Establish engineering processes without unnecessary bureaucracy.
- Own technology costs, technical risks, and production readiness.
Requirements:
- 7+ years of software engineering experience.
- Experience as a Principal/Staff Engineer, Engineering Director, VP Engineering, CTO, or equivalent.
- Experience building fintech, payments, banking, wallets, or financial infrastructure.
- Strong backend and distributed systems experience.
- Experience with financial transaction/ledger systems.
- Experience leading engineering teams.
- Strong cloud architecture and security experience.
Good to have:
- Digital wallets and payment gateways.
- Payment orchestration / Card issuing / CaaS.
- Crypto wallets, blockchain, stablecoins, custody.
- MPC/HSM.
- Banking-as-a-Service.
- Cross-border and multi-currency payments.
- Ledger architecture.
Technology:
Experience with several of:
- Backend: Java, Node.js .
- Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB.
- Cloud and Infrastructure: AWS.
- Messaging: Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS/SNS.
- Security: OAuth, OIDC, JWT, KMS, HSM, Secrets Management.
- Blockchain: Ethereum/EVM, Bitcoin, Solana or other major chains.
Good to Have:
- Hands-on and technically strong.
- Entrepreneurial and comfortable with ambiguity.
- Product-minded and pragmatic.
- Security-conscious and data-driven.
- Fast-moving and outcome-focused.
- Strong at hiring and building teams.
- An excellent communicator and stakeholder manager.
- You should be comfortable being an architect, engineer, leader, product partner, and security champion- sometimes all in the same day.