Vice President, Engineering (Digital Assets & Payments)

Work Schedule: Full Remote

Reports To: CTO

Engagement: Cross-functional partnership with Product Commercial and Executive Leadership Teams

About the Company: Our client is a rapidly scaling digital assets and payments infrastructure company reshaping how people and businesses across Africa access trade and interact with cryptocurrency.

With a mission to make digital asset adoption effortless secure and universally accessible the company provides the underlying technology that powers individuals enterprises and fintechs across the continent.

Built on innovation trust and long-term impact our client is developing next-generation financial infrastructure designed to support the future of cross-border commerce digital payments and the broader crypto economy in Africa.

This is an opportunity to join a business at a pivotal momentscaling aggressively innovating continuously and operating at the intersection of finance and frontier technology.

About the Role

Our client is seeking a Vice President Engineering to lead the end-to-end engineering organisation and scale a world-class high-performance digital asset trading platform.

This role is pivotal: you will architect the next evolution of the platform build and scale high-performing teams and create the engineering culture and systems required to support 10x growth in the coming year.

If you excel in high-growth high-stakes environments and are driven to build resilient scalable systems that can power millions of users this opportunity is built for you.

Key Responsibilities

1. Drive Engineering Excellence and Operational Velocity

Establish strong alignment between Engineering and Product within the first 90 daysensuring shared priorities predictable delivery and accountability.

Implement an engineering execution framework that improves delivery speed and code quality by 30% within the first quarter.

Standardize engineering rituals (sprints retrospectives code reviews) for consistent high-quality output.

2. Lead Platform Architecture & Infrastructure Evolution

Conduct a full architecture assessment within 90 days to identify scalability latency and reliability gaps.

Design and execute a 12-month platform evolution roadmap (Java-based) with clear milestones for modularization scalability and performance optimization.

Ensure infrastructure readiness to support 10x transaction volumes with sub-second latency (<1s) by Q1 2026.

3. Redesign & Scale Technical Teams

Redefine engineering team structure within 60 days to improve clarity ownership and inter-team coordination.

Recruit and onboard at least three senior-level engineers or technical leads (Java Distributed Systems DevOps) by Q1 2026.

Deploy an onboarding process that ramps new engineers to full productivity within 30 days.

4. Build Grow and Retain a High-Performing Engineering Culture

Introduce a career development and performance management framework within the first 3 months.

Identify and groom high-potential engineering talent into leadership pathways by Q3 2026.

Maintain an engineering retention rate of 95% by partnering closely with People & Culture.

Biggest Challenges Youll Solve

Translating rapidly evolving product and market priorities into clear engineering execution.

Scaling core infrastructure to support new product experiences and massive transaction growth.

Building a culture of ownership speed reliability and engineering discipline.

Recruiting and retaining world-class engineering talent in a competitive global market.

Requirements

What Were Looking For

710 years leading high-performing engineering teams (30 engineers) in high-growth crypto fintech payments or marketplace environments.

Deep technical expertise in Java-based backend systems and distributed systems architecture.

Proven ability to design engineering org structures that drive speed autonomy and accountability.

Strong partnership track record with Product Commercial and Design teams.

Experience recruiting and scaling senior engineering talent.

Demonstrated ability to scale platforms without compromising reliability or security.

Nice-to-Haves

Experience scaling crypto exchanges wallets or digital payments platforms.

Exposure to blockchain technologies smart contract design or cryptographic security.

Familiarity with fintech/crypto regulatory and compliance frameworks.

Why This Opportunity Stands Out

This is not a routine engineering leadership roleits a chance to architect the future of digital finance across an entire continent.

You will:

Shape engineering strategy for a high-growth digital asset platform.

Build and scale a world-class engineering organization.

Drive real impact across Africas rapidly evolving crypto and payments ecosystem.

Influence product infrastructure and platform decisions at the highest level.

If youre seeking a role where your leadership technical vision and execution excellence can create outsized impact this is one of the most exciting engineering opportunities in the African crypto space today.

Benefits