Head of Engineering

Head of Engineering

London, UK • Full-Time • Senior Leadership • Fintech / Payments

About the Company

We are a Series B fintech startup on a mission to make real-time payments seamless, secure, and accessible for businesses of all sizes. we are building the next generation of payments infrastructure and we need exceptional engineering leadership to take us there.

Our stack powers billions of pounds in transactions annually, and we are growing fast. This is a rare opportunity to shape the technical direction of a company at an inflection point.

The Role

We are looking for a Head of Engineering to lead our 40-person engineering organisation, set the technical vision, and partner closely with our CPO and CEO to drive product delivery. You will be the most senior technical voice in the company and a key member of the executive leadership team.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will be expected to go deep when it matters while also operating at the strategic level bridging the gap between engineering execution and business outcomes.

What You'll Do

• Own the engineering roadmap and translate business strategy into actionable technical plans
• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of engineers across backend, frontend, platform, and data disciplines
• Drive architectural decisions for our core payments platform, ensuring scalability, security, and regulatory compliance (PCI-DSS, PSD2, FCA)
• Partner with Product, Design, and Commercial teams to ship high-quality, customer-facing features on time
• Establish and improve engineering processes, including delivery cadence, incident management, and on-call practices
• Own technical hiring — build a world-class engineering culture that attracts and retains top talent
• Define and track engineering KPIs: reliability, deployment frequency, lead time, and developer experience
• Represent engineering at board level and with key investors and enterprise clients

What We're Looking For

Essential

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in an engineering leadership role
• Proven track record of leading and scaling engineering teams (20+ engineers) in a high-growth technology environment
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud-native architecture (AWS or GCP), and API design
• Experience in financial services, payments, or highly regulated industries is a strong advantage
• Excellent communication skills comfortable presenting to C-suite, board members, and enterprise stakeholders
• Experience running Agile/product-led engineering teams with a focus on outcomes over output

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with payments standards and compliance frameworks (PCI-DSS, Open Banking, ISO 20022)
• Experience with Kafka, Kubernetes, Go, or Python at scale
• Prior experience in a Series B–D growth-stage startup
• Exposure to security-first engineering practices and SOC 2 / ISO 27001 environments

What We Offer

• Competitive salary: £180,000 – £220,000 depending on experience
• Meaningful equity package (EMI options)
• Hybrid working: 3 days in our London Bridge HQ, 2 days remote
• £5,000 annual learning & development budget
• 25 days holiday + bank holidays + your birthday off
• Regular offsites, team events, and a culture that takes the work seriously but not itself

Engineering Principles

• Build for resilience: payments infrastructure is critical — we design for failure and own reliability
• Ship iteratively: we favour fast, safe releases over big-bang deployments
• Engineers own outcomes: our teams have full autonomy from design through production
• Psychological safety first: the best ideas win, regardless of seniority