Chief Technology Officer
Location: Amsterdam (Hybrid)
Industry: FinTech / Payments / Trading
Overview
A fast-growing fintech business is looking to appoint a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to lead its next phase of growth. With a strong market position and a team of ~50 employees globally, the company is now entering a critical scaling phase, transitioning from reliance on third-party vendors to building a best-in-class in-house engineering organisation.
This is a high-impact leadership role where you will define the long-term technology vision, professionalise the engineering function, and build a scalable, high-performing platform to support rapid business growth.
Key Responsibilities
Technology Strategy & Vision
- Define and execute the company's end-to-end technology roadmap aligned with commercial and product goals
- Act as a key member of the leadership team, contributing to overall business strategy and growth
Build & Scale Engineering Function
- Take ownership of transitioning core systems from external vendors to a fully in-house engineering team
- Design and implement a clear hiring strategy to scale engineering, data, and infrastructure capabilities
- Establish team structure, leadership layers, and career frameworks
Vendor to In-House Transition
- Evaluate existing third-party systems, dependencies, and architecture
- Lead the gradual migration and knowledge transfer into internal teams
- Optimise cost, control, and long-term scalability by reducing vendor reliance
Architecture & Platform Ownership
- Oversee the design of scalable, secure, and high-performance systems
- Ensure the platform can handle large transaction volumes with strong reliability and uptime
- Drive modern engineering practices including microservices, cloud-native architecture, and observability
Product & Data Collaboration
- Work closely with product and commercial teams to build data-driven solutions
- Support the development of advanced capabilities across payments, risk, fraud, or trading infrastructure
Operational Excellence
- Implement best practices across software development, testing, deployment, and monitoring
- Define KPIs, SLAs, and performance benchmarks for the engineering organisation
Stakeholder Management
- Communicate effectively with senior leadership, investors, and non-technical stakeholders
- Act as the technical face of the company internally and externally
Requirements
- Proven experience leading engineering teams in fintech, payments, trading, or a high-scale tech environment
- Strong track record of building and scaling engineering organisations (ideally from early-stage to growth)
- Experience transitioning from vendor-led solutions to in-house development is highly desirable
- Deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and scalable architecture
- Strong understanding of data-driven systems, ideally with exposure to risk, fraud, or financial systems
- Hands-on technical background with the ability to challenge and guide engineering decisions
- Excellent communication skills and ability to operate at board/executive level
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