Principal Software Engineer

We're looking for a hands-on Principal Software Engineer / CTO 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:

• 10+ 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.