Head of Payments & Identity

Role overview

A senior engineering leadership role charged with standing up and running the engineering domain that owns the full user-and-money lifecycle, from identity verification and fraud prevention through deposits, withdrawals, and accurate financial bookkeeping in the core ledger. The position turns a loosely organised payment capability into a structured organisation spanning Payments, KYC/Identity, Anti-Fraud, and Core Ledger, leading roughly thirty engineers and engineering leaders. It suits a builder-leader who can shape architecture, set culture, and balance customer conversion against security, regulatory, and financial-integrity demands.

Responsibilities

- Design the organisational structure, team boundaries, and leadership model for a domain of approximately thirty engineers and managers across Payments, KYC/Identity, Anti-Fraud, and Core Ledger. - Set domain strategy, target architecture, and an execution roadmap in partnership with Product, Finance, Compliance, Risk, and Operations. - Make the user-and-money flow reliable end-to-end: KYC feeding fraud decisions, fraud controls protecting payment flows, and payment events producing accurate, idempotent ledger entries. - Raise the speed, quality, and predictability of integrations with payment providers, KYC/AML vendors, and other partners, including regions where APIs and operations are inconsistent. - Strengthen resilience, observability, and security for external integrations, including fallback design, incident response, and integration quality standards. - Modernise business-critical systems and move fragmented accounting toward a central, reliable ledger architecture. - Define and track domain metrics covering conversion, reliability, processing speed, fraud losses, reconciliation accuracy, delivery performance, and cost efficiency.

Requirements

- Track record leading a sizable engineering organisation or multiple cross-functional teams of roughly thirty or more people, including engineering managers and senior technical leaders. - Experience building or substantially scaling an engineering function, domain, or complex platform rather than only maintaining an established setup. - Strong systems thinking: ability to connect customer journeys, product flows, architecture, operations, risk controls, and financial outcomes. - Background leading complex integrations and business-critical systems where correctness, availability, security, and auditability are non-negotiable. - Solid engineering and architectural foundation, with the ability to challenge technical decisions, coach senior leaders, and spot systemic risks. - Fluent English and clear communication with both technical and non-technical stakeholders at senior levels.

Nice to have

- Experience in payments, fintech, banking, brokerage, crypto, wallets, marketplaces, or other high-volume transactional products. - Hands-on integration work with multiple regional payment service providers or financial providers in markets where infrastructure is less standardised. - Familiarity with KYC/identity, AML, transaction monitoring, payment anti-fraud, reconciliation, or ledger systems. - Experience migrating fragmented or legacy accounting components to a central ledger or other financial source of truth. - Building internal tools and workflows for Finance, Compliance, Risk, or operational back-office teams.

Benefits and work setup

- 20 paid vacation days per year and 10 paid sick leave days. - Public holidays per the company's approved calendar. - Medical insurance, professional education budget, language learning budget, and a wellness budget covering gym membership and sports gear. - Remote-friendly working setup.