Chief Technology Officer (CTO) – Payments & Fintech

Reports To: Chief Executive Officer

Industry: Payments / Merchant Acquiring / Fintech

The Opportunity

Our client is seeking a highly accomplished Chief Technology Officer to lead the technology strategy, engineering organization, and continued evolution of a sophisticated payments platform.

This is a hands-on technology leadership role, not simply an executive oversight position. The CTO will combine deep payments-domain expertise with strong architectural judgment and the ability to lead engineering teams operating secure, highly available, transaction-intensive platforms.

The successful candidate will bring meaningful experience across merchant acquiring, payment processing, processor and network integrations, money movement, APIs, and regulated financial infrastructure, with the ability to translate business strategy into a scalable technology roadmap.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the technology vision and architecture for the payments platform, establishing a roadmap that supports growth, scalability, product innovation, operational efficiency, and reliability.
• Lead payments infrastructure and integrations across processors/acquirers, card networks, financial institutions, sponsor banks, gateways, and payment rails, including architecture, certification, migration, cutover, failover, and production operations.
• Provide technical leadership across critical payment functions including authorization, routing, clearing and settlement, reconciliation, disputes, refunds, chargebacks, tokenization, merchant lifecycle management, and transaction reporting.
• Drive the evolution of an API-first payments platform, supporting merchant acceptance and adjacent capabilities such as issuing, embedded payments, account-to-account payments, payouts, ledgering, and broader money movement.
• Own platform reliability, security, and operational resilience, including availability, latency, observability, incident response, disaster recovery, access controls, data integrity, fraud controls, and PCI-related responsibilities.
• Lead and develop high-performing engineering, platform, infrastructure, SRE, security, data, and technical product teams, establishing clear accountability, architectural standards, and a culture of disciplined execution.
• Partner closely with product, operations, risk, compliance, commercial leadership, financial institutions, processors, and technology partners to ensure technology investments support both customer needs and business objectives.
• Establish a practical data and AI strategy, identifying production use cases across fraud/risk, authorization optimization, reconciliation, operational automation, developer productivity, and other areas while maintaining appropriate security, privacy, governance, monitoring, and human oversight.

Ideal Background

The successful candidate will bring 10+ years of progressive technology and engineering leadership, including significant senior-level responsibility within payments, merchant acquiring, fintech, or regulated financial technology.

Deep payments expertise is essential. Candidates should demonstrate direct experience with high-volume payment processing platforms and processor, acquirer, card-network, bank, gateway, or payment-rail

integrations, rather than solely product or commercial exposure.

Experience should include several of the following:

Merchant acquiring and payment acceptance • Authorization and transaction routing • Processor integrations • Card networks • Payment gateways • POS/omnichannel payments • Issuing/issuer processing • ACH and real-time payments • Settlement and reconciliation • Ledgering • Embedded payments/BaaS • APIs and developer platforms • Tokenization • Fraud/risk technology • PCI/security • Cloud infrastructure • SRE/high-availability systems

The CTO should also have demonstrated responsibility for platform modernization, reliability, cybersecurity, incident management, engineering organizational design, talent development, budgets, vendor strategy, and executive/board-level communication. The underlying research specifically distinguishes true CTO-level operating ownership from payment-product experience alone.

Leadership Profile

We are looking for a technology executive who remains close enough to the technology to challenge architecture, evaluate engineering trade-offs, participate meaningfully in major incidents, and make informed build/buy/partner decisions.

The ideal leader combines strategic thinking with a strong bias toward execution and can operate effectively in a fast-moving payments environment. They should be comfortable moving between architecture and engineering discussions, operational metrics, security and compliance issues, product strategy, commercial priorities, and executive-level decision making.

Most importantly, this individual will have a track record of building and operating payments technology that merchants, financial institutions, networks, partners, and customers can depend on at scale.