Principal Software Engineer/Chief Technology Officer

About the Role:

We are looking for a hands-on Principal Software Engineer/Chief Technology Officer to own the complete technology function of an early-stage fiat + crypto fintech wallet startup.

With a team of approximately 15 people, this is not a traditional large-company CTO role. The ideal candidate should be comfortable moving between architecture, coding, hiring, security, vendor selection, product discussions, infrastructure, and technical strategy.

You will be responsible for taking the platform from its current stage to a secure, scalable, production-ready financial platform capable of supporting customers, merchants, fiat payments, crypto transactions, and future financial products.

You will work closely with the CPO, Product, Operations, Compliance, Risk, Security and Engineering teams and will be the ultimate owner of the company's technology vision and execution.

Key Responsibilities:

Technology Strategy & Architecture:

- Define and own the company's technology strategy, roadmap, and engineering principles.

- Translate business/product strategy into technical architecture and execution plans.

- Make critical build-vs-buy decisions; select vendors for payments, custody, KYC/KYB, infrastructure, and blockchain services.

- Own architecture for the complete wallet ecosystem: fiat wallets, deposits/withdrawals, P2P, merchant payments, multi-currency, crypto wallets, multi-chain support, token management, custody, on/off-ramps, and stablecoins.

Financial Ledger & Integrity:

- Design and oversee double-entry ledger architecture covering customer wallets, merchant accounts, fiat/crypto/rewards ledgers, fee/gate/suspense/settlement/treasury accounts.

- Ensure immutable transactions, idempotency, atomicity, accurate balances, full auditability, reconciliation, and traceability with no balance manipulation outside controlled ledger processes.

Engineering Leadership & Hands-On Work:

- Lead, hire, and mentor engineers; define team structure, standards, processes, code/architecture reviews, and career development.

- Remain technically hands-on: review/write code, design APIs and schemas, debug production issues, review infrastructure/security, and write technical specs.

Security, Cloud & Reliability:

- Own security posture: MFA, passkeys, device binding, encryption, secrets management, API/infrastructure security, key management, HSM/MPC, fraud controls, audit logging, and crypto-specific controls (private keys, hot/cold wallets, withdrawal controls, key rotation).

- Own cloud/infrastructure strategy (AWS/GCP/Azure, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, CI/CD, VPC/IAM, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka/message queues, monitoring/observability) and establish prod/stage/dev, DR, backups, HA.

- Define and monitor reliability metrics (uptime 99.99%+, API latency, transaction success rate, payment failure rate, DB/queue health, blockchain connectivity, settlement failures, MTTR) and run incident management/on-call/postmortems.

Integrations, Compliance & Product Collaboration:

- Architect integrations with banks, payment gateways/processors, card issuers, KYC/KYB/AML providers, custody, blockchain RPC, fraud/FX providers, SMS/email; designed for reliability, security, idempotency, retry, webhook verification, monitoring, and failure recovery.

- Partner with Compliance/Operations to embed KYC/KYB, AML, transaction monitoring, sanctions screening, Travel Rule, audit trails, data retention/privacy, and regulatory reporting into architecture and product design.

- Collaborate closely with Founder/CPO on product roadmap, feasibility, prioritization, MVP scope, launch planning, and PMF iterations.

Required Experience:

Must Have:

- 10+ years in software engineering; prior VP Engineering/Engineering Director/Principal/Staff or equivalent leadership.

- Proven experience building/scaling fintech, payments, banking, wallets, or financial infrastructure.

- Strong distributed systems and backend engineering experience; experience with financial transaction systems.

- Experience managing engineering teams; strong cloud architecture and security understanding.

Skills

CTO, Technical Architect, IT Strategy, IT Security