TENTEN Partners is retained on a confidential mandate to hire a Head of Engineering for a regulated fintech infrastructure business operating at the intersection of payments, settlement, and digital-asset enabled workflows.
This is not a keep-the-lights-on role. It's a build + scale + harden mandate.
The Mandate
Own the engineering function end-to-end people, platform, delivery, security, reliability, and execution rhythm. You will take a growing engineering team (internal + external) and turn it into an institutional-grade capability with modern DevOps, strong observability, and a security-first SDLC aligned to regulated expectations.
You will be expected to operate like an engineering GM: shipping outcomes, building systems, and raising standards.
What You'll Be Accountable For
1) Engineering Leadership & Operating System
- Build and lead a high-performance team across backend, frontend, platform/DevOps, and QA
- Set the engineering operating system: OKRs, sprint cadence, quality gates, release governance
- Design the right hybrid model (in-house + vendors) and hold partners to measurable outputs
- Establish a culture of ownership, clean execution, and calm, high-standards delivery
2) Platform Delivery: CI/CD, IaC, and Release Velocity
- Implement a modern CI/CD pipeline with automated testing, approvals, and rollback strategy
- Drive Infrastructure-as-Code and environment consistency (e.g., Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker)
- Make releases boring: predictable, observable, and safe
- Reduce cycle time while increasing stability and control
3) Reliability, Observability & Incident Readiness
- Build a proper observability stack: metrics, logs, traces, alerting, SLOs
- Implement incident management and postmortems with measurable improvements
- Architect for uptime and scale across transaction-heavy flows (payments + settlement)
4) Security-First Engineering (Regulated Standard)
- Embed secure SDLC: code review discipline, dependency scanning, secrets management, pen testing
- Harden APIs and integrations (authN/authZ, idempotency, encryption, least privilege)
- Ensure systems are audit-ready with defensible controls and clear documentation
- Partner with compliance/risk to meet regulatory and institutional partner expectations
5) Payments + Digital Asset Connectivity
- Oversee systems that touch transaction processing, settlement workflows, reconciliation, and audit trails
- Lead (or intelligently govern) stablecoin / blockchain connectivity, wallet operations, and monitoring where relevant
- Ensure operational resiliency: observability, reconciliation, exception handling, and real-time visibility
The Profile We Need
This role will suit someone who has built and scaled engineering in regulated or regulation-adjacent fintech and can combine speed with controls.
Must-have experience
- 712+ years engineering experience with 35+ years leading teams
- Experience delivering payments / transaction processing / settlement systems (or similarly high-integrity platforms)
- Strong hands-on understanding of cloud + DevOps (AWS preferred) and modern delivery practices
- Proven ability to scale teams (distributed/remote) and manage external delivery partners
- A track record of turning chaos into systems: cadence, standards, observability, reliability
Technical credibility (non-negotiable)
- Backend strength (e.g., Node.js / Python / Go or similar)
- Strong API design and integration experience (REST/webhooks; versioning; idempotency)
- Production-grade data layer skills (e.g., PostgreSQL, Redis)
- Modern platform tooling: containers/orchestration and infrastructure automation
