Principal Engineer (CTO)

Requirements:

• Hands-on Principal Engineer / CTO for an early-stage fiat + crypto wallet startup.
• Experience: 10+ years, coming from Principal/Staff Engineer, VP Engg, Engineering Director, or similar.
• Must Have: Deep fintech/payments/banking/wallet/financial infrastructure experience, not a generic SaaS CTO.
• Core technical depth: Backend + distributed systems + financial transaction systems/ledger architecture. They specifically care about double-entry ledger, reconciliation, idempotency, atomicity, and accurate/auditable balances.
• Strong preference: Someone who has built digital wallets/payment gateways/card issuing/BaaS/cross-border payments, ideally with crypto/blockchain/stablecoin/custody exposure too.
• Still hands-on: Must be able to review/write code, design APIs and distributed systems, debug production, and review architecture/security, not be a people-manager CTO.
• Leadership: Own architecture + engineering team + hiring + security + infra + vendors + technical roadmap. Basically Architect + Engineer + CTO.
• Tech: Java/Node/Go/Kotlin/Python; PostgreSQL/Redis; AWS/Kubernetes/Docker/Terraform/Kafka. Do not add or modify anything; just do the alignment.