Deputy CTO to $10000

Billease is seeking a Deputy Chief Technology Officer (Deputy CTO) who will serve as a senior technical authority and a trusted partner to the CTO. This role requires deep hands-on expertise, a strong theoretical foundation, and proven experience designing, building, and operating complex systems within a fintech environment.

The Deputy CTO will independently drive architectural decisions, ensure platform stability, security, and scalability, and effectively bridge engineering execution with business and regulatory requirements. 

Architecture & Technical Leadership

• Design, evolve, and govern scalable, secure, and highly available architectures.
• Strong experience with microservices, event-driven systems, and modular monoliths, with clear trade-off analysis.
• Deep grounding in design patterns, SOLID principles, and Clean Architecture.
• Lead architecture and code reviews, technical due diligence, and major design decisions.
• Own and maintain architecture documentation (C4, ADRs, diagrams).

Platform, Cloud & Infrastructure

• Hands-on leadership of production Kubernetes environments (EKS/GKE).
• Strong knowledge of Helm, ingress controllers, autoscaling (HPA/VPA), and zero-downtime deployment strategies (blue-green, canary, rolling).
• Deep experience with AWS (VPC, EC2, EKS, RDS, S3, Route53, Load Balancers) and working knowledge of GCP (GKE, Pub/Sub, Cloud SQL).
• Design secure, highly available, cost-efficient multi-AZ cloud architectures.
• Strong understanding of IAM, backups, disaster recovery, and cost governance.

Security & Reliability

• Strong information security mindset aligned with financial-grade standards.
• Experience with encryption (in transit/at rest), key management, secrets storage, VPNs, and secure networking.
• Solid networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, routing, firewalls, DNS, and load balancing.
• Ownership of observability and reliability practices using Prometheus, Grafana, Victoria Metrics, logs, metrics, traces, alerts, and SLOs.

Backend, Data & Messaging

• Strong hands-on experience with Python (FastAPI/Flask/Django) and Golang for high-performance services.
• Deep understanding of Linux and Docker (multi-stage builds, runtime security).
• Experience with messaging and streaming platforms (Kafka, RabbitMQ), including retries, DLQs, and delivery semantics.
• Strong database expertise: PostgreSQL, MySQL, ClickHouse, SQL optimization, and familiarity with NoSQL systems.
• Experience with logging/search stacks (ELK).
• Solid understanding of data warehousing and pipelines (Redshift, Airflow, ETL/ELT, data quality).

Fintech, Payments & Domain Knowledge (Mandatory)

• Proven experience working in a fintech company.
• Strong understanding of regulatory and compliance constraints, risk management, and security requirements.
• Hands-on knowledge of card payment systems (authorization, clearing, settlement), PCI-DSS, payment gateways, and 3-D Secure.
• Understanding of end-to-end transaction flows, reconciliation, and financial reporting.
• Experience supporting collections systems or workflows is a strong advantage.

Mobile & Integrations

• Ability to review and guide high-scale mobile applications (Android: Kotlin/Java, iOS: Swift).
• Experience collaborating with mobile teams on API design, security, performance, and release coordination.
• Strong experience designing and debugging integrations using standard internet protocols (HTTPS, SMTP, SFTP).

Leadership & Ways of Working

• Proven experience leading senior engineering teams and acting as a technical authority.
• Ability to mentor engineers, provide structured feedback, and drive execution.
• Experience hiring and onboarding senior engineers is a plus.
• Strong Agile and delivery management skills (Scrum/Kanban), including backlog prioritization, release planning, risk management, and stakeholder communication.
• Strong Git and CI/CD practices.