Head of Engineering

Democrance; Town of Poland (NY); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Attractive salary

Health insurance

Employee stock options

Learning and development opportunities

Job summary

Democrance, located in New York, is seeking a Head of Engineering to oversee and guide the engineering organization. This pivotal role involves ensuring the design of secure, scalable architectures and aligning them with business goals.

You will lead multiple engineering teams, driving the technical strategy across the company. Ideal candidates will possess a strong background in software development and proven leadership skills.

This role offers a competitive compensation package and a collaborative work environment.

Qualifications

• 12-15 years of hands-on software development experience, including 5+ years of leading engineering teams.
• Strong backend engineering expertise, deploying production systems using Spring Boot.
• Experience driving alignment across technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Oversee the technical landscape of the engineering organization.
• Guide architectural design decisions and resolve technical roadblocks.
• Build and scale high-performing engineering teams.

Skills

Leadership

Backend Engineering

Software Development

Agile Methodologies

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or Engineering

Tools

Java

Spring Boot

Docker

AWS

Job description

Who we are

Moniepoint Inc. is Africa’s all-in-one financial platform, helping 20 million businesses and individuals access seamless payments, banking, credit, cross-border, and business management tools each month.

As Nigeria’s largest merchant acquirer, we power most of the country’s point-of-sale (POS) transactions. Through our subsidiaries, Moniepoint Inc. processes over $250 billion in digital payment transaction value annually.

About the role

As a Head of Engineering, you will play a pivotal role in overseeing the entire technical landscape of our engineering organization. You will guide and lead engineering managers and their teams while ensuring we are building scalable, secure, and innovative architectures. Working closely with business leaders and engineering managers (EMs), you will help align our technical vision with business goals and ensure a smooth pipeline from coding to deployment. The role is hands‑on, requiring a mix of leadership, technical expertise, and operational excellence.

We are looking for someone who has a strong engineering background, leadership skills, and a passion for fostering collaboration and trust within teams. You will be accountable for setting technical standards, addressing technical debt, mentoring teams, and ensuring the scalability and security of the product's architecture. In addition, you will oversee team development, recruitment, and performance management to build high‑performing teams capable of delivering results on time.

What you’ll get to do

• Contribute to and drive the company‑wide technology strategy, ensuring the platform and broader business systems are prepared to scale reliably across markets, products, and growing transaction volumes.
• Own the technical strategy across the ecosystem, aligning architecture, infrastructure, and delivery with company goals for reliability, scalability, security, and regulatory compliance.
• Guide architectural and solution design decisions across teams, removing technical roadblocks for Engineers, and ensuring robust, future‑proof system and software architecture.
• Build, lead, and scale multiple high‑performing engineering teams, including managers and senior individual contributors.
• Strengthen team capacity and capability through proactive mentorship, structured career development, succession planning, and rigorous performance management.
• Drive hiring strategy and org design to support near‑term and medium‑term growth of the engineering organization.
• Establish and continuously improve end‑to‑end observability, monitoring, alerting, and incident management frameworks to support high system availability (targeting 99.9999%+ uptime).
• Improve software reliability across the platform by implementing strong operational excellence practices and incident response mechanisms.
• Set and uphold high standards for engineering excellence, including code quality, testing, QA automation, documentation, and CI/CD pipeline maturity.
• Proactively manage and reduce technical debt while leading company‑wide initiatives to improve overall codebase health and maintainability.
• Improve methodologies and systems for tracking engineering metrics, system health, team performance, and developer productivity.
• Define, track, and optimize KPIs such as system performance, transaction success rates, infrastructure efficiency, cost optimization, and team velocity.
• Optimize cloud infrastructure usage and costs while maintaining performance, reliability, and security standards.
• Collaborate closely with Product, Compliance, Legal, Risk, Sales, Marketing, and Business stakeholders to ensure engineering delivery aligns with company priorities and regulatory requirements.
• Ensure systems are secure‑by‑design, with strong ownership of data privacy, fraud prevention, and regulatory readiness.
• Build and maintain long‑term technical and architectural roadmaps to keep the platform ahead of industry and technology trends.
• Foster a high‑trust, high‑performance engineering culture grounded in accountability, autonomy, continuous learning, and operational excellence.
• Contribute to broader company‑wide engineering initiatives across financial services and business tooling (e.g., Payment, lending, savings, deposits, cards, and business management platforms) to elevate the overall engineering organization.

To succeed in this role, we think you should have

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 12‑15 years of hands‑on software development experience, including 5+ years of successfully leading multiple engineering teams and driving large‑scale technical initiatives.
• Significant prior experience as a Software Engineer, with a strong track record of designing scalable systems and operating in a software architecture capacity (approximately 60/40 technical and people leadership).
• Strong backend engineering expertise, with practical experience deploying production systems (e.g., using Spring Boot or similar modern backend frameworks); frontend exposure is a plus.
• Proven experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, deployment systems, and managing technical debt at scale.
• Demonstrated ability to lead managers and multiple cross‑functional teams simultaneously in complex, fast‑paced environments.
• Prior experience managing distributed and remote teams across multiple geographies.
• Strong experience with agile methodologies, sprint planning, and efficient technical resource management.
• Proven track record of mentoring, performance management, and developing high‑performing engineering teams.
• Demonstrated ability to drive alignment across engineering and non‑technical stakeholders.
• Experience introducing engineering innovations that materially improve team productivity, delivery speed, and operational efficiency.
• Experience in fintech or regulated technology environments is a strong plus, especially in high‑scale platforms.
• Exposure to emerging markets or a strong interest in solving problems related to financial inclusion and financial well‑being is advantageous.

Cultural Alignment (Must‑Have Soft Skills)

• High Agency & Ownership: A sense of urgency and 100% involvement; you seek out impactful problems and act without waiting for permission.
• Grit: The perseverance to see complex problems through to resolution, especially when challenges are difficult.
• Clarity of Thought: The ability to articulate complex concepts and technical decisions with precision and candour.
• Empathy: Strong empathy for the business, customers, and engineering team to ensure effective prioritization and decision‑making.
• No Ego: Prioritizes team success and actively collaborates with others.

Some of the technologies you’ll get to work with

• Java (latest versions)
• Spring and Spring Boot
• Docker and Kubernetes
• PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Elastic Search
• Microservices architecture on AWS

What we can offer you

• Culture – We put our people first and prioritize the well‑being of every team member. We’ve built a company where all opinions carry weight and where all voices are heard. We value and respect each other and always look out for one another. Above all, we are human.
• Learning – We have a learning and development‑focused environment with an emphasis on knowledge sharing, training, and regular internal technical talks.
• Compensation – You’ll receive an attractive salary, pension, health insurance, employee stock options, annual bonus, plus other benefits.

What to expect in the hiring process

• Stage 1: A preliminary phone call with one of our recruiters.
• Stage 2: System Design – You’ll be asked to solve complex system design problems to assess your technical and architectural skills.
• Stage 3: Technical Leadership & Architecture round – with two of our Heads of Engineering, dive deeper into technical challenges with advanced system design problems and assess your ability to lead others.
• Stage 4: PM/Cultural Fit & Leadership – Explore your leadership qualities, cultural fit, and ability to drive technical teams while fostering a positive, inclusive environment.
• Stage 5: Founder Interview: 60 minute interview with our Co‑founder/CTO.

How to apply

Please send us your CV or LinkedIn profile via our career website.

Equal Opportunity

Moniepoint is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees and candidates.

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