Location: Liechtenstein/DACH/(onsite/hybrid also possible)
Type: Full-Time | Executive Leadership
Industry: Fintech / Financial Services / Regulated Environments
Reporting to: CEO
Purpose
To lead the company’s technology strategy, architecture, and execution — aligning tech innovation with business outcomes. The CTO is accountable for ensuring the seamless delivery, security, and scalability of systems, while fostering cross-functional alignment and enabling growth across engineering, IT, and infrastructure.
Key Responsibilities
Technical & Architectural Leadership
- Define and own the technical vision and long-term architecture strategy.
- Oversee technology decisions, architecture reviews, and systems design across both back-end and core banking platforms.
- Stay ahead of industry trends, regulatory shifts, and new tech developments, fostering innovation and resilience.
- Oversee cloud infrastructure strategies and documentation of best practices for deployment, scaling, and recovery.
Product & Platform Delivery
- Lead end-to-end delivery of scalable, secure, and compliant tech platforms across mobile, banking core, authentication, and internal tools.
- Drive the modernization of legacy systems while balancing technical debt, risk, and innovation.
- Manage build vs buy decisions, roadmap prioritization, and vendor relationships (e.g., KYC, payment gateways, API providers).
Engineering & IT Oversight
- Lead distributed engineering teams (10–50+ engineers) and IT teams across geographies and time zones.
- Manage and support all team hiring, including future team development and restructuring to better align to new business priorities
- Organize all team’s priorities and tasks, as well as manage team members responsibilities and performance
- Oversee IT infrastructure and governance, ensuring regulatory and audit readiness (e.g., PCI, SEPA, ISO).
- Ensure the implementation and maintenance of robust security and compliance frameworks, including Information Security Management Systems (ISMS), in order to meet strict regulatory requirements
- Lead and manage all IT related regulatory topics including internal frameworks, concepts and audits
- Establish engineering best practices across PHP, Java, and JS ecosystems and maintain high availability (99.9%+ uptime).
Organizational Enablement
- Build a high-performance engineering culture that fosters accountability, ownership, and innovation.
- Implement career development frameworks, mentoring, and performance management practices across tech teams.
- Foster cross-functional collaboration with Product, Compliance, Legal, Sales, Operations, and Executive Leadership.
Strategy & Business Alignment
- Align technology strategy with overall business goals and go-to-market initiatives.
- Provide budget planning, resource allocation, and strategic input on product/tech roadmap at the executive level.
- Design, revise, implement and monitor the adherence to IT policies that support company compliance and technological adoption
- Lead during regulatory audits, mergers/acquisitions, and major technology transitions.
Core Competencies
- Strategic Vision: Able to see the “big picture” and translate abstract goals into executable technology plans.
- Technical Acumen: Understands architectural trade-offs, system design, security, compliance, and scalability.
- People Leadership: Builds, scales, and motivates large, multi-disciplinary engineering and IT teams.
- Cross-Functional Influence: Navigates regulatory, operational, and business complexity with stakeholders.
- Operational Discipline: Brings rigor in release cycles, incident response, uptime management, and vendor governance.
- Excellent communication with multicultural experience, fluent in English (German is a strong plus)
Ideal Candidate Profile
Experience:
- 15+ years in software engineering and IT, with 5–10+ years in executive leadership (CTO, VP/Director of Engineering).
- Experience in fintech, banking, or regulated tech environments with direct exposure to audits, compliance frameworks, and mission-critical uptime.
- Successfully led platform modernizations, cloud migrations, and hybrid infrastructure environments.
- Managed both engineering and IT delivery (e.g., release processes, helpdesk, onboarding/offboarding, vendor tools).
Differentiators:
- Has led teams through M&A, platform transitions, or compliance-driven scale-ups.
- Hands-on experience managing diverse tech stacks (e.g., PHP, Java, JavaScript).
- Balanced mindset around legacy system risk, technical debt, and innovation pace.
- Regulatory/law experience & certifications: EGG, ZDG, SPG, SPV, DSG FMAG, NIS2 directive, DORA, EBA, etc.
You Are:
- A conductor, not just a coder — orchestrating across functions and domains.
- Equally fluent in business and tech, boardroom and backlog.
- Calm under pressure with a bias for execution, clarity, and team enablement.