Vice President of Engineering

About Staq Staq is a leading embedded-finance platform enabling banks and financial institutions globally. As we scale into new markets and expand our product portfolio, we’re building out the executive bench to match our growth trajectory. The Role This is a senior technical leadership role, acting as second-in-command (2IC) to the Chief Technology Officer. You’ll take primary ownership of executing Staq’s technology roadmap, running day-to-day engineering delivery across the platform, and deputizing for the CTO in technical leadership forums, architecture reviews and board updates when required. This role is designed for someone who can operate with full CTO-level context and judgement, freeing the CTO to focus on company-wide technology strategy and external representation. Key Responsibilities Technical Strategy & Architecture Own execution of the technology roadmap, translating the CTO’s architectural vision into delivered systems.Set and enforce engineering standards across languages, infrastructure and delivery practices.Own key architectural decisions in the CTO’s absence, ensuring consistency with Staq’s long-term technical direction.Engineering Delivery & Operations Lead delivery across engineering squads, ensuring a predictable, high-quality shipping cadence.Own platform reliability: uptime, incident response, on-call processes and postmortems.Drive engineering rigor around CI/CD, testing and release management.Security & Compliance Partner with Compliance and Security to ensure engineering practices meet regulatory requirements for a regulated fintech environment (encryption, access control, audit logging).Own vendor and infrastructure security reviews.Leadership & Team Building Build, scale and mentor engineering leadership, including developing future engineering managers and tech leads.Deputize for the CTO in leadership meetings, technical due diligence and board or investor technical updates as required.Governance & Reporting Own technical reporting to the CTO and executive team: delivery status, technical risk, infrastructure costs and resourcing needs.Step in as primary technical decision-maker when the CTO is unavailable. Minimum Qualifications 10+ years in software engineering, including 4+ years in a VP Engineering, Head of Engineering, or equivalent senior leadership role.Track record of owning technical delivery and architecture for a scaled, production B2B platform.Experience building and leading engineering teams, including hiring and developing engineering managers.Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure, distributed systems and modern engineering practices (CI/CD, IaC, observability).Experience in regulated environments (fintech, banking, payments) strongly preferred. Core Skills Software architecture and technical strategy execution.Engineering delivery management at scale, across multiple squads or teams.Cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP or Azure), Kubernetes, Terraform.Security and compliance fundamentals (encryption, RBAC, audit logging).Executive-level technical communication. Nice to Have Experience in embedded finance or banking-as-a-service platforms.Prior experience deputizing for or reporting directly into a CTO or VP Engineering.Exposure to AI/ML platform engineering.