Role Overview

We are recruiting on behalf of a client for a highly experienced Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to lead the design, ownership, and operation of mission-critical transactional systems. This role is not focused on hands-on coding, but on architectural accountability, system reliability, security, and production excellence.

The successful candidate will take full responsibility for transactional integrity across payments, bookings, and financial state management, ensuring systems are auditable, secure, resilient, and capable of handling real-world failures and incidents.

This is a senior leadership role with direct impact on the company’s core platform.

Key Responsibilities

Transactional Systems & Architecture

• Design, build, and own transactional infrastructure including payments, booking flows, and system state management.

• Define and govern state machines and event-driven architectures to ensure consistency and reliability.

• Implement idempotent operations to prevent double charges, duplicate actions, or inconsistent system states.

• Ensure correct handling of retries, delayed events, partial failures, and reconciliation processes.

Payments & Financial Integrity

• Lead integrations with payment providers, including webhook handling, retry logic, and transaction reconciliation.

• Ensure all financial operations are fully traceable, auditable, and compliant with business and regulatory expectations.

• Maintain a clear distinction between technical responses and actual transactional outcomes.

Security, Control & Governance

• Oversee system security, including role-based access control (RBAC), secrets management, and access governance.

• Ensure audit logging and traceability across all sensitive and financially relevant operations.

• Protect legally and financially sensitive data across all environments.

Production Ownership & Reliability

• Own live production systems with defined SLAs and operational standards.

• Establish incident management, escalation processes, and post-mortem practices.

• Take full accountability for system uptime, transactional correctness, and recovery from failures.

Leadership & Accountability

• Provide architectural leadership and technical decision-making at an executive level.

• Set quality standards and drive a culture of ownership, resilience, and engineering excellence.

• Act as the ultimate authority for system behavior, outcomes, and reliability.

Required Experience & Expertise

Transactions & Payments

• Proven hands-on experience with real-money transactions, payments, webhooks, idempotency, and reconciliation.

• Strong understanding that a successful API or HTTP response does not guarantee a successful transaction.

System Architecture

• Demonstrated experience designing and operating state machines and event-driven systems.

• Ability to clearly articulate system states, failure recovery strategies, and event sequencing.

Security & Compliance

• Practical experience with RBAC, audit logs, and secrets management.

• Background working with sensitive financial or legally regulated data.

Production Operations

• Experience running live production systems with defined SLAs.

• Direct involvement in incidents and post-incident reviews.

• Strong sense of ownership and accountability for system outcomes.

Strong Advantages

• Experience in FinTech, escrow, wallets, booking platforms, or payment-heavy systems

• Background in regulated or quasi-banking environments

• Experience scaling transactional platforms

• Exposure to incidents with real financial impact

Profiles Not Suitable for This Role

• Experience limited to marketing websites, CRM tools, or admin panels

• Primarily UI/UX-focused roles with limited backend ownership

• No exposure to real-money transactions or production incidents

Work Model

• Senior autonomy with full architectural ownership

• Direct influence on core product and platform design

• Quality-driven engineering environment

• Hybrid work model with initial flexibility and later office-based collaboration

• Requires full professional commitment

Language Requirements

• English: Fluent

• Additional languages are a strong advantage