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.

What We Offer

• An opportunity to make something great even greater, you can be the reason why we grow, develop, and become the best fintech company on the market!
• Career prospects - we are young, we have huge ambitions, and it is important that our employees grow with us
• Work with coworkers who are passionate about their business
• Compensation that will fully correspond to the competence and knowledge, with yearly performance reviews
• Remote work
• 20 days of vacation time; bank holidays; sick leaves; additional birthday day off.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We are looking for a part-time Database Architect to join our team. You will be responsible for making our data infrastructure reliable and helping it grow. We need someone who has strong technical opinions and knows how to build resilient, high-performance database systems. This role is perfect for someone who prefers working with a focused, high-impact data environment rather than managing a massive amount of data sprawl.

WHAT YOU’LL BE WORKING ON

• Collaborative Infrastructure Design: You will work closely with the DevOps team to suggest and design solutions for our infrastructure. Your role is to provide the architectural vision while working together on implementation.
• High Availability: You will design and maintain replication, failover, and clustering to make sure our systems are always running and fault-tolerant.
• Backups & Disaster Recovery: You will design and test backup strategies to ensure we can restore data quickly with almost no downtime.
• Observability & Monitoring: You will use tools like Prometheus and Grafana to watch our systems, check their health, and set up alerts for any issues.
• Zero-Downtime Maintenance: You will handle routine tasks like patching and vacuuming using blue-green update techniques to avoid service interruptions.
• Automation: You will use Ansible and Terraform to make infrastructure and deployment processes more efficient.
• Architecture & Design: You will lead the planning of our database systems and provide a clear point of view on how to design schemas for better performance.
• Performance Engineering: You will find performance problems and tune queries and indexes based on how the system is being used.
• Development Support: You will work closely with engineering teams to help them optimize queries and plan safe database migrations.
• Security & Access Management: You will manage database security, encryption, and rules for data access.

• Incident Response: You will help find the root cause of database problems and write clear documentation for our systems and recovery steps.

   

WHAT YOU NEED TO SUCCEED IN THIS ROLE

• PostgreSQL Expertise: You have 4+ years of hands-on experience managing production environments at a terabyte scale, such as a fleet of up to 100 instances.
• Technical Conviction: You have a proven ability to recommend and advocate for the best database setups and high-availability systems.
• Cloud Proficiency: You have experience managing databases in major cloud environments (like AWS, Azure, or GCP) or private/VPS setups. Knowledge in Amazon Aurora, NoSQL, Columnar DBs, and/or Timeseries is a plus.
• Automation Mindset: You have a strong background in scripting and automation to manage production environments efficiently.
• AI: having the skill to use AI tools to assist with coding or monitoring is a great advantage.

WHAT WE OFFER

• An opportunity to make something great even greater, you can be the reason why we grow, develop, and become the best fintech company on the market!
• Career prospects - we are young, we have huge ambitions, and it is important that our employees grow with us
• Work with coworkers who are passionate about their business
• Compensation that will fully correspond to the competence and knowledge, with yearly performance reviews
• Remote work
• 20 days of vacation time; bank holidays; sick leaves; additional birthday day off.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Own both the strategy and the execution: 

• Build and own the GTM motion - who we sell to, how we reach them, what we lead with, and how we iterate based on what actually works.
• Map the competitive landscape - understand where Whitelark sits among payment orchestrators, in-house solutions, and adjacent platforms, and how the market is shifting.
• Translate market signals into product direction — work directly with the engineering and product team to align the technical roadmap with commercial opportunities. You're the voice of the market in the product conversation.
• Identify and develop partnerships — PSPs, acquirers, integrators, and ecosystem players that accelerate distribution or expand the product's value.
• Run enterprise conversations end-to-end — from initial outreach through deal close.
• Build the intelligence layer — market trends, customer pain points, win/loss patterns, pricing dynamics. Make this institutional knowledge, not tribal.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Domain-deep, commercially sharp, technically fluent: 

• Payments domain expertise — you understand acquiring, routing, processing, settlement, chargebacks, and the compliance stack (PCI DSS, AML, 3DS, open banking) without needing a primer.
• B2B SaaS business model fluency — you know how to position a platform product, structure commercial terms, and think about land-and-expand revenue, not just first deals.
• Competitive market awareness — you're familiar with the payment orchestration landscape and adjacent players, and you have a perspective on how Whitelark is differentiated.
• Hands-on GTM experience — you've built a go-to-market motion before, not just managed one that someone else designed.
• Cross-functional range — you're comfortable in a technical roadmap conversation and can give engineering and product teams market context they can actually act on.

WHAT WE OFFER

• An opportunity to make something great even greater, you can be the reason why we grow, develop, and become the best fintech company on the market!
• Career prospects - we are young, we have huge ambitions, and it is important that our employees grow with us
• Work with coworkers who are passionate about their business
• Compensation that will fully correspond to the competence and knowledge, with yearly performance reviews
• Remote work
• 20 days of vacation time; bank holidays; sick leaves; additional birthday day off.