Head of Engineering

Role: Head of Engineering
Company: xpate
Location: London or remote
Job Type: Full-time

• Lead the platform and organizational transformation from the inside, together with the current team.

• Own the whole technical picture: infrastructure, architecture and vendors.

• Replace the traditional PM → engineer handoff. Test the idea that engineering and product can work as one, with engineers talking directly to the business and domain experts.

• Move code writing to LLMs with automated QA. Start where mistakes are cheap and reach the critical financial components later.

• Hire engineers who talk to people and ask questions, not only write code. You can bring in 1-2 people who share the vision.

• Focus on internal efficiency. The business sets the direction - the job is not to set a product or market vision of your own.

xpate has been a card acquirer since 2019. It combines acquiring and banking for B2B clients only, with €100M+ in annual revenue. About 100 people work there, around 15 of them in engineering. HQ is in London, and the team is spread across Latvia, Cyprus, Serbia and Singapore.

The business is changing. xpate is moving from direct sales to distribution through platforms and partners: embedded finance and Payfac-as-a-Service. The platform has to change with it. Tooling, data flow, processes and the release cycle all need a rebuild, and much of the workflow is still tracked by hand.

xpate also wants to become AI-native. Guardrails go around the core - the data layer and financial data - so it can't be lost, rewritten or broken. Everything else runs through an agentic harness on top, so non-engineering teams can build their own tools by prompting agents.

• Months 1-3: bring all data flow - customer, financial and manual - into one clear perimeter.

• Months 4-6: build the harness on top, so non-engineering teams can prompt agents, create their own tools and run their workflows.

• You have built financial systems: ledger, reconciliation, processing, gateway, double-entry accounting. Ideally you wrote them yourself, and you know what a few cents of error cost at scale.

• You have a strong data architecture background.

• You can hold the full technical picture: infrastructure, architecture and vendors.

• You are a senior engineer with proven results. Team size doesn't matter - leading 4-5 people is fine.

• You know code quality and review still matter, and you are ready to change how the work gets done.

• You think and talk like a business person.

• You are a mature operator: collaborative, transparent, no "I know best". You change things carefully and still make bold calls.

• Payments or acquiring background is not required - any financial systems experience works.

• Nice to have: you have rebuilt or transformed a team before.

• Nice to have: you are based in London.

• A new role with a clear mission: transform the platform and the way the company works.

• Direct work with the founders, reporting to the CEO.

• A team of about 15 engineers to inherit and reshape.

• A profitable company moving into Payfac-as-a-Service and embedded distribution.

• An AI-native setup where non-engineers build their own tools.

• Year 1 is fixed pay. From year 2, shadow equity tied to P&L performance, with a path to real equity. Details to be agreed.