đ Location: Riga, Latvia (hybrid)
đŠ Product: Payments / Acquiring (EMI journey, new company & product)
đ° Compensation: âŹ5,000â7,000 net/month
đ Seniority: Executive / Technology Leadership
đ Experience: Proven hands-on background in payments processing & acquiring
đ„ Employment: Full-time
Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
Weâre supporting a newly established fintech company in Latvia in hiring a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to lead the end-to-end technology strategy and execution for a new acquiring-focused payments product.
This role sits at the core of the business: the company is building a next-generation acquiring platform that combines EMI capabilities, payment processing, and a modern payment gateway. The CTO will shape the full technology foundationâarchitecture, vendor ecosystem, engineering culture, scalability, and operational reliability.
This position is ideal for a hands-on engineering leader who understands the commercial, technical, and compliance demands of the payments industry and is ready to build the product and the team from the ground up.
What Youâll Do
Technology Strategy & Architecture
- Define and execute the technology strategy aligned with product goals, regulatory expectations, and long-term scalability.
- Own the architecture for payment processing and acquiring, including security, reliability, performance, and data integrity.
- Establish engineering standards: SDLC, code quality, testing frameworks, documentation, and release processes.
Payments & Scheme Integrations (Core Focus)
- Lead and, when necessary, directly implement integrations with Visa, Mastercard, and other payment rails.
- Own integrations with external vendors: KYC/AML providers, PSP/processing partners, fraud systems, monitoring tools, etc.
- Ensure robustness across all payment workflowsâauthorisation, capture, settlement, refunds, chargebacks, reconciliation, reporting.
Product & Delivery Leadership
- Work closely with founders and business stakeholders on shaping the product roadmap and delivery priorities.
- Translate product requirements into scalable and compliant technical solutions.
- Drive a culture of ownership, fast iteration, and disciplined engineering execution.
Engineering Management & Team Building
- Lead and scale the engineering team: hiring, onboarding, mentorship, performance management, and career development.
- Build an engineering culture that balances speed with security, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
- Implement clear delivery processes and accountability structure across the tech organisation.
Security, Reliability & Compliance Readiness
- Ensure the platform meets security and compliance expectations relevant to payments and EMI environments.
- Drive best practices in encryption, secure key management, access control, monitoring, auditing, and incident response.
- Support external audits and security reviews, including scheme requirements.
Technology Operations & Service Management
- Own platform availability and resilience, including redundancy, failover, DR planning, and operational continuity.
- Define and run incident management processes with on-call rotation, escalation paths, and severity handling.
- Monitor and optimise performance KPIs: authorisation latency, throughput, error rates.
- Ensure full observability across transaction and system flowsâmonitoring, logging, alerting, dashboards.
- Meet scheme operational requirements and any mandatory reporting obligations.
Technology Stack
- Core languages: PHP, Go
- APIs: Node.js (TypeScript)
- Protocols: REST APIs, gRPC
- Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, AWS RDS & Aurora, data modelling, performance optimisation
- Messaging / Events: Kafka or RabbitMQ (event-driven payment flows)
- Caching & asynchronous processing
- Cloud: AWS (infrastructure design, scaling)
- Containers: Docker, Kubernetes (required)
- IaC: Terraform
- CI/CD: GitHub Actions / GitLab CI with automated testing pipelines
- Observability: Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch, Sentry (or equivalents)
What You Bring
- Proven hands-on experience building payments processing, acquiring platforms, or payment infrastructure(not just e-commerce integrations).
- Direct experience with payment scheme integrations (Visa/Mastercard) or closely related transactional rails.
- Strong engineering background with ability to dive deep technically when needed.
- Experience leading engineering teams and delivering complex products in fast-paced environments.
- Ability to balance strategic architectural thinking with practical executionâespecially around integrations, vendor management, and operational readiness.
- Excellent communication skills and ability to align technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- âBuilderâ mindset â comfortable operating in a new company with a greenfield product.
Why Join?
- Full-time executive role with âŹ5,000â7,000 net/month, depending on experience.
- High-impact leadership position shaping the architecture, product, and engineering organisation from day one.
- Opportunity to build a next-generation payments/acquiring platform from the ground up.
- Close collaboration with founders, product, operations, and regulatory stakeholders.
- Fast-moving, modern environment where technology sits at the centre of the business.
- Real ownership and influence over long-term scalability, performance, and technical excellence.
Interested? Letâs talk. Reach out and weâll share more about the company, the setup, and next steps.