CTO / VP of Engineering for FinTech Company

About the Company

The company is an international FinTech business focused on high-volume B2C lending across Europe, LATAM, and Asia.

It runs across five active markets and is now preparing for the next stage of technical scale. The main challenge is to evolve a complex multi-market lending platform into a more scalable, reliable, and launch-ready technology ecosystem that can support new geographies, new product types, and higher operational speed.

The company is looking to strengthen its technology leadership with someone who can manage a large technical platform, modernize legacy systems, improve delivery predictability, strengthen cybersecurity and infrastructure, and build the technical foundation for faster market launches.

This role is not only about engineering management. It is about owning the technology side of business scaling in a regulated, data-heavy FinTech environment.

Main Responsibilities

• Own system delivery, uptime and security across 5 active markets (RO, CZ, ES, MX, IN) with full accountability for the IT/engineering budget.
• Lead market launches end-to-end, deliver a fully functional system live in a new country within 3 months: local contractor negotiations, integrations with local providers (KYC, payments, scoring, bureaus), performance tuning, and go-live readiness.
• Scale operations without scaling headcount proportionally: automate, standardize, and reuse a multi-country core so each new market adds load, not linear cost.
• Establish and enforce SLAs and measurement points (uptime, latency, incident rate, lead time).
• Own the security and compliance posture: pass regulator and security audits, achieve and maintain certifications and local regulatory audits and ensure systems cannot be compromised.
• Apply Pareto discipline to the backlog: keep the team focused exclusively on the top-priority 20% that drives 80% of value; actively kill not needed tickets; no idle or downtime.
• Build a team of senior specialists with ownership (not a school of juniors); own hiring, performance standards and retention, upgrade the weakest performers with stronger ones.
• Build and maintain effective engineering processes (delivery, on call/incident, release, change management) with clear ownership and predictable throughput.
• Ensure system documentation is comprehensive and clear, enabling external teams to implement functionality with minimal onboarding.
• Act as the company's technical representative for potential investors and regulators.

Expected Results

• Delivery on timeline: launch three system instances within 3 months each, each passing defined performance and security gates before go-live (no soft launches that bypass the gate).
• Scale without linear cost: add new markets while keeping IT headcount flat or sub-linear - demonstrable cost-per-market trending down, not up.
• Uptime & stability: maintain agreed SLA/uptime across all 5 markets, with incident rate and mean-time-to-recovery tracked and improving quarter over quarter.
• Security & compliance: pass all required security and regulatory audits and hold certifications, critical findings; remediate high findings within SLA.
• Backlog discipline: reduce the backlog to no more than 30 open tasks and hold it there, with predictable delivery throughput (stable lead time / cycle time).
• Team upgrade: build a strong org by replacing the weakest ~30% with stronger senior specialists; functioning team with clear ownership and no single points of failure (no key-person risk).
• Documentation & handover: system documentation complete enough that an external team can implement functionality with minimal onboarding - verified by an actual handover, not by assertion.
• Budget accountability: deliver the roadmap within the approved IT budget, with spend justified per function and per market.

Professional Qualifications

• 5+ years as CTO / IT Director / CIO / Director of Engineering in a product company (CTO-1 acceptable at a larger organization).
• Strong background in management for at least 6 years.
• Proven ownership of an engineering org of 40+ technical people, predominantly senior-to-mid (not juniors).
• Track record of global / multi-region expansion and running IT operations across regions, including launching systems in new countries on a fixed timeline.
• Hands-on through external audits and formal certification: security audits, regulator audits, required certification.
• Direct accountability for an IT budget, with the judgment to size IT spend correctly.
• Experience hiring and managing international external contractors and communicating with potential investors and regulators.
• Domain experience in at least one of: fintech, consumer lending, BNPL or other high-volume, CPA-sensitive verticals (e-commerce or marketplace platforms, dating, gambling, forex).
• Artifact-first work style: ships dashboards, architecture docs and metrics - not slide decks with general observations.
• Practical experience implementing new technologies in production.
• Fluent in English.
• Comfortable managing fully remote, distributed teams across multiple time zones.