Space Executive
Chief Technology Officer
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Chief Technology Officer
Stealth Fintech | Payments | London (Hybrid)
Competitive base plus meaningful founding-level equity
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.
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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
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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.
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