Chief Technology Officer

Chief Technology Officer

Stealth Fintech | Payments | London (Hybrid)

Competitive base plus meaningful founding-level equity

First senior technology hire. Pre-launch. Founding-level scope.

We are partnering with a payments business currently operating in stealth, with a live launch planned in the coming months. The company is funded with strong financial backing, has a working product in private testing, and a committed pipeline of launch partners waiting on go-live.

What it does not yet have is a technology leader.

This is the first senior technology hire the company has made. You will join before launch, inherit a small and capable engineering team, and own the technology decisions that everything after go-live is built on: architecture, hiring, security posture, regulatory readiness and the engineering culture that carries all of it.

Very few people get to make those calls from a clean sheet on a funded payments platform. This is one of those windows.

What you will own:

• Getting to launch. Take the platform from private testing to production. Set the scope, sequence the work and make the calls on what ships at launch and what waits.
• Architecture for what comes next. Build for the volume the business expects twelve and twenty-four months out, not just for day one. Decide what the current build keeps, what it replaces and what is good enough for now.
• Team building. Scale engineering from a small founding group upwards. Define the hiring bar, the interview process and the org structure. Your first ten hires will shape everything that follows.
• Reliability and security. Own uptime, incident response and the security roadmap for a business where downtime will carry a direct and immediate revenue cost from the moment it goes live.
• Compliance and regulatory engineering. Partner with compliance on PCI DSS, safeguarding and SOC 2 requirements, and build the controls, audit trails and reporting a regulated payments business needs in place before launch rather than after.
• The executive seat. Report to the CEO, sit on the leadership team, and act as the technical voice in board discussions, funding conversations and early enterprise diligence.

What we are looking for:

• Senior engineering leadership experience as a VP Engineering, Head of Engineering or CTO in a high-growth or early-stage environment
• Hands-on background in payments, banking or another regulated financial services domain. You understand the difference between moving data and moving money
• Experience shipping a product into production and scaling it afterwards. You have hired engineers, built structure where there was none and made hard architectural calls under commercial pressure
• Genuine technical depth in distributed systems, event-driven architecture and cloud infrastructure. Credibility with engineers is non-negotiable
• High tolerance for ambiguity and a bias towards building rather than administering. Pre-launch means unfinished, and that should appeal rather than concern you
• The commercial fluency to sit in front of investors, auditors and early enterprise customers and represent the platform convincingly

Also useful:

• Exposure to card schemes, acquiring, PSP integrations or ledger design
• Experience taking a business through a security certification or regulatory audit for the first time
• Previous experience at a pre-launch or stealth business through to go-live

What is on offer:

• Competitive base salary plus bonus
• Meaningful equity, joining pre-launch. This is a founding-level allocation, not a standard executive grant
• Hybrid working from central London
• Funded with strong financial backing and a clear runway to build properly rather than firefight
• Direct line to the CEO and a genuine seat at the table on commercial strategy

Process:

An initial confidential conversation with me, followed by stages with the CEO, the board and a technical panel. Built to move quickly, with launch timelines in mind.