Head of Engineering

Kleos Space; Greater London; On-site; GBP 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Kleos Space in the United Kingdom is seeking a deeply technical, hands-on CTO to own the architecture and technical foundation of the product.

You will lead architecture strategy, security, and AI-native engineering while strengthening the existing team and delivering scalable fintech platforms.

This role emphasizes deep coding, production issue resolution, and direct impact on product strategy and company growth.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of hands-on software architecture and technical leadership.
• Experience building or scaling fintech, payments, payroll, or transactional products.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, integrations, infrastructure, security, and reliability.
• Strong ability to review code, challenge architectural decisions, and resolve complex production issues.
• Experience handling sensitive financial data.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture strategy and long-term technical roadmap.
• Raise engineering quality with standards for design, testing, and release readiness.
• Improve observability, testing, and incident management.
• Lead and develop the engineering team with mentoring and ownership.
• Integrate AI into the software development lifecycle and automations.

Skills

Software architecture

Technical leadership

Security & reliability

AI in software development

Team leadership

Code review

Mentoring

Product thinking

Architectural roadmap

Tools

PHP

Go

PostgreSQL

Redis

Docker

Kubernetes

Argo CD

GCP

Job description

About Kleos

Kleos is building a global platform for hiring, managing, and paying international teams. Our product combines global payroll, contractor management, payments, and compliance.

As Kleos expands across new markets, currencies, providers, and transaction flows, we are looking for a deeply technical, hands‑on CTO to own the architecture and technical foundation of the product.

Kleos already has an established engineering and QA team responsible for building and developing the platform. We are not looking to add another management layer. We need a strong architect who can raise the technical bar, strengthen the existing team, and help us scale quickly and safely.

People leadership matters, but this is first and foremost a technical leadership role.

What you’d own

Architecture and technical strategy

• Enhance and evolve Kleos’ technical architecture and long‑term technical strategy.

• Assess the current system, identify critical risks and bottlenecks, and build a clear technical roadmap.

• Design scalable and reliable systems for payments, payroll, external integrations, and sensitive financial data.

• Make key architectural decisions that balance product speed, security, reliability, and maintainability.

• Stay close to the codebase, review critical solutions, and step into complex engineering and production issues when needed.

• Manage technical debt deliberately and prevent it from slowing down the business.

Raise engineering quality

• Set clear standards for technical design, clean code, testing, code reviews, documentation, and release readiness.

• Improve automated testing, observability, production stability, and development workflows.

• Challenge weak technical decisions and help the team build better, more maintainable software.

• Introduce lightweight and predictable engineering processes without unnecessary bureaucracy.

Security and reliability

• Make security a core part of architecture and product development.

• Strengthen access management, data protection, infrastructure security, logging, monitoring and auditability.

• Establish clear incident management, escalation, post‑incident review, disaster recovery, and business continuity processes.

• Work closely with Product, Operations, and Compliance in a regulated fintech environment.

Build an AI‑native engineering function

• Integrate AI into technical design, coding, code review, testing, documentation, debugging and incident analysis.

• Automate repetitive engineering and QA workflows.

• Create practical standards for safe and effective AI‑assisted development.

• Measure the impact of AI on delivery speed, product quality, defects and engineering efficiency.

Lead and develop the team

• Set a high technical bar and improve ownership and decision‑making across engineering.

• Help developers and QA engineers grow through mentoring, feedback and strong technical leadership.

• Work closely with Product to turn business priorities into scalable technical solutions.

• Identify capability gaps and help hire strong engineers as the company grows.

What we are looking for

• 10+ years of strong hands‑on experience in software architecture and technical leadership.

• Experience building or scaling fintech, payments, banking, payroll or another transactional product.

• Deep understanding of distributed systems, external integrations, infrastructure, security and reliability.

• Strong ability to perform deep code reviews, challenge architectural decisions, and solve complex production issues.

• Experience working with sensitive financial and personal data.

• Strong knowledge of testing, observability, incident management and software quality.

• Experience leading and developing engineering teams.

• Practical experience using AI across the software development lifecycle, beyond basic code generation.

• Strong product thinking and the ability to connect technical decisions with business outcomes.

• Ability to introduce structure while keeping the organization fast and pragmatic.

This role is not suitable for a management‑only CTO. You should be comfortable going deep into architecture, code, infrastructure, security and complex production issues.

Our stack

PHP, Go, PostgreSQL, Redis, S3, Docker, Kubernetes, Argo CD и GCP.

Why join Kleos

• Own the architecture of a growing global fintech‑HRtech product.

• Solve complex challenges across payments, payroll, compliance and financial infrastructure.

• Have a direct impact on product strategy and company growth.

• Strengthen and shape an established engineering function.

• Build practical AI‑native engineering processes with measurable results.

• Combine deep technical work with real business impact.