whitelark.io

About the Role
 

We're building a card-acquiring platform from scratch — and there's a critical layer that sits between engineering and finance that nobody owns yet: how the product actually moves money.

That means merchant and BIN onboarding, scheme processing, settlement and reconciliation, fiat payouts via SEPA and SWIFT, and making sure all of it is safeguarding-compliant. Right now this layer lives across our CTO and CFO. You'll own it — end to end.

No legacy systems. No bureaucracy. No ticket conveyor belt. Just you, a small senior team, and a genuinely hard domain where the decisions you make in the first six months will shape how money flows through the platform for years.

This is not a CFO role — we don't expect P&L, capital adequacy, or FP&A. It's not a Scrum PO or a BA. It's the owner of the financial and payments product layer: someone who digs into the domain themselves, writes specs engineers can build from, and makes product decisions. Disputes/chargebacks, FX, and the merchant-facing portal sit in adjacent roles.

What You'll Own:
 

• Merchant & BIN onboarding — design how merchants get set up in our core processing platform, end to end.
• Scheme processing — get into the mechanics of authorisation, 3DS, clearing and settlement, and own the product decisions that follow.
• Settlement & reconciliation — define how money moves from scheme settlement into our ledger and through to safeguarding accounts. Spec it to the point engineering can build.
• Fiat payouts — own the product side of SEPA and SWIFT payouts through our banking partners, including what we need from each integration.
• Safeguarding — make sure every money movement decision is designed with regulatory requirements in mind, in close collaboration with the CFO.

You'll Be a Strong Fit If:
 

• You have 4–6+ years in product at a payments or fintech company — ideally regulated. You know what that means in practice.
• Card acquiring isn't new to you: BIN sponsorship, interchange, scheme fees, 3DS, PSD2 exemptions — you've worked with these, not just read about them.
• You can take a requirement from a regulator or CFO and turn it into something engineers can actually build.
• You're comfortable driving alignment with a CTO and CFO directly — no product director needed as a go-between.
• You understand how money moves: settlement, reconciliation, correspondent banking, SEPA, SWIFT — well enough to spot when something is wrong.
• You figure things out yourself. You read the docs, you call the counterparties, you don't wait to be briefed.
• You think in flows, not features — you see the end-to-end journey of funds, not a backlog of disconnected tickets.

Requirements:

Must have

• 5+ years in DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering.
• Production AWS experience (EKS, IAM, VPC, RDS).
• Terraform — modules, remote state, multi-environment infrastructure.
• Kubernetes — production operations, Helm.
• CI/CD — building, maintaining, and improving pipelines.
• Linux, networking, scripting (Bash + Python or Go).
• Secrets management and security fundamentals (IAM, least privilege).
• Observability — metrics, logs, and alerting (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalent).
• AI fluency — actively uses AI tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or similar) in day-to-day engineering work. Not just "aware of AI" — uses them to multiply productivity while applying engineering judgment to the output.
• Proactivity — identifies problems before they surface, proposes solutions, and drives them to completion. Doesn't wait to be told what to do.
• English: confident reading and listening is a must. 
  
   

What you'll do:

• Infrastructure as Code: Design and evolve Terraform modules for AWS (composite modules, accounts as code), and build a multi-environment foundation across non-prod / pre-prod / prod.
• Kubernetes: Operate and evolve EKS clusters — workloads, namespaces, resources, autoscaling, and network policies.
• CI/CD: Build, maintain, and improve GitHub Actions pipelines — faster, more reliable delivery with fewer manual steps.
• GitOps / Delivery: Manage Helm charts and ArgoCD for declarative Kubernetes deployments.
• Secrets & Access: Own secrets management, rotation, least-privilege access, and keep secrets out of code.
• Observability: Build metrics, dashboards, and alerting (Amazon Managed Prometheus + Amazon Managed Grafana), define SLOs, and improve incident response.
• Security & Networking: Manage IAM, environment separation, and secure access with Okta and Twingate.
• Databases (Operations): Operate PostgreSQL (RDS) and Redshift — configuration, backups, secret rotation, and operational reliability.
• Reliability: Drive production readiness, capacity planning, cost optimization, HA where it matters, and operational runbooks.
   

Stack:

• Cloud: AWS (EKS, RDS, IAM, VPC, etc.)
• IaC: Terraform
• Containers: Docker, Kubernetes (EKS), Helm
• GitOps: ArgoCD
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions
• Observability: Amazon Managed Prometheus (AMP), Amazon Managed Grafana (AMG)
• Database: PostgreSQL (RDS), AWS Redshift (OLAP)
• Auth / Access: Okta, Twingate
• AI: AI-first — active use of AI tools and AI agents in daily engineering work.
   

Nice to have

• FinTech, payments, or banking infrastructure experience.
• Experience building toward or maintaining PCI DSS compliance.
• ArgoCD / GitOps.
• Amazon Managed Prometheus / Grafana.
• AWS Redshift.
• Multi-account AWS environments with clear non-prod / pre-prod / prod separation.

You're the only designer. Brand, motion, website, product, presentations — all yours. Full ownership; you decide what the company looks like and defend it directly to the founder.
 

Brand first. Logo, identity, visual language, motion, landing page — from a blank page. Not "make it look nice" — make it recognizable.

AI-first. One person can't cover this scope without it. AI tools are already part of your process, and it shows in your output.

No incoming task queue. You bring directions, propose options, push back on weak decisions. Waiting for tasks won't work here.
 

What You'll Do

Brand & identity — Visual language from scratch: logo system, color, typography, grid, iconography, illustration. Living brand guidelines used by both the team and AI agents. One brand across all touchpoints.

Motion — Motion as brand language: animated logo, landing page animations, payment explainer videos, promo content. Micro-animations in the product. You set the movement principles — timings, curves, hierarchy.

Landing page & web — Main website from structure to live: visuals, responsive, states. You ship it with the frontend team (Next.js + Tailwind) and verify in the browser, not just hand off a mockup.

Product — Audit and rework of dashboards, transaction tables, settlement, chargebacks, onboarding, case management. You own visuals, UX, and the design system: Figma library, tokens, components, code sync.

Marketing — Investor and sales decks, one-pagers, infographics, LinkedIn templates, conference materials.

AI & automation — AI at every stage: concepts, variations, image/video generation, prototyping. Automate routine, keep guidelines in a format AI agents can actually use.
 

Requirements

Must have

• 3+ years with real experience in both brand and product
• Portfolio that shows full brand systems (not just logos) taken from blank page to market
• Motion at brand-language level — a system of movement, not just pretty animations; implementable on the web
• Product interfaces: dashboards, tables, complex forms, B2B or SaaS
• Design system ownership: built, maintained, synced with code
• Strong visual taste; expert-level Figma
• Landing pages end-to-end with understanding of how frontend builds them
• Experience as the only designer or in an equally autonomous role
• AI genuinely in your daily workflow — you adopt tools, apply judgment, ship production-quality output
• Proactive: you bring ideas, push back, drive to done
• Curiosity about fintech: acquiring, settlement, chargebacks — domain understanding matters
• English: confident reading/listening required; spoken is a strong plus
   

Nice to have

• Fintech / payments / B2B SaaS background
• Rebranding or market-entry brand work
• Redesigning a live product with legacy
• 3D, illustration, video editing
• Can build pages yourself: Framer, Webflow, or code
• Copywriting and positioning

About the role

Small team, no legacy, no bureaucracy — just strong engineers making the right technical decisions together. This role lives in our Finance domain: settlements, reconciliation, bank integrations, and core banking.

Fintech experience is non-negotiable. You need to arrive with payments knowledge, take ownership fast, and become the go-to expert on settlement and reconciliation. The engineering bar is high — we expect independent judgment and quality delivery.
 

What you'll build

• Financial core — immutable ledger, settlement engine, IC++/blended pricing, rolling reserves
• Integrations — gateways, processors, KYC/KYB, SEPA/SWIFT via REST APIs
• Compliance workflows — Camunda 8, transaction monitoring, sanctions screening, SAR workflows
• Merchant & Ops portals — settlements, payouts, chargebacks, AML, disputes, underwriting
• Developer portal — API docs, integration guides, sandbox
• Reconciliation & reporting — full payment lifecycle; regulatory, scheme, and financial reports
• Quality — automated unit, integration, and E2E tests. No manual QA.
   

What you bring

• 6+ years Kotlin/Java (Spring Boot) — REST, JPA/Hibernate, transactions
• 3+ years Next.js/React — SSR, TypeScript, state management
• Strong PostgreSQL — complex queries, indexing, JSONB, migrations
• Webhook processing, event-driven systems, OAuth2/OpenID Connect
• Hands-on fintech experience — settlements, reconciliation, bank and core banking integrations
• AI fluency — daily use of Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, or similar with real engineering judgment
• Proactivity — you find problems before they find you and drive solutions to completion
• English — confident reading/listening; strong spoken English is a plus