Head of Engineering

Company: X Location: Remote, or Relocation to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia..

Reports to: Co-founder / Chief Technology Officer

Type: Full-time

About Us:

The company is the digital-asset custody and infrastructure platform for the GCC. We hold institutional crypto safely, settle transactions across chains, and expose all of that as a developer API and a regulated-grade institutional console.

Why this role exists

Engineering at our company is at a turning point. The team is small, specialized, and shipping reliably. Over the next 18 to 24 months we will scale the engineering organization, mature delivery operations, and continue earning trust with regulators and tier-1 institutional customers.

The Head of Engineering is the operational leader of that function. You will partner closely with the CTO, who owns technical strategy and architectural direction for the custody platform. You will own everything it takes to get great engineers in the door, set them up to do their best work, and ship a regulated-grade platform on a predictable cadence.

What you'll own

Team build and hire. Top of funnel through closing offers. Comp bands, levels framework, performance cycles, and headcount planning into Series A and beyond.

Engineering operations. On-call, incident command, post-mortem culture, code-review standards, deployment hygiene, release cadence.

Delivery. Translate the technical roadmap into quarter-over-quarter delivery against named outcomes. Surface and close execution risk early.

Audit and regulator-facing engineering posture. SOC 2 Type II completion, SAMA-aligned controls, future ISO 27001 and regulatory licensing readiness.

Cross-functional leadership. Partner with Product, Compliance, Security, and the CTO on roadmap, sequencing, and trade-offs.

Engineering culture. Hiring bar, internal mobility, professional growth, retention. Make us a place senior engineers stay and recommend.

You are not fixing a broken organization. The team is small, healthy, and specialized. Your job is to amplify it, not restructure it.

Must-haves

7 to 12 years total software engineering, with 4-plus years on a custody platform or key management system at a regulated entity: a custody firm, a regulated digital-asset bank, or a TradFi bank's digital-asset custody arm. General fintech without custody depth does not substitute.

Hands-on credibility with at least one of: HSM lifecycle management, MPC / TSS systems, or threshold signing protocols. You can read a signing-service incident report and know what to ask next. Has owned a team of 15+ engineers at peak, directly as line manager or through embedded engineering managers.

Hired 10-plus engineers personally, including at least one Senior-plus leader.

Owned the engineering side of one SOC 2 Type II or equivalent regulated audit cycle. Owned it, not "participated in audit support."

On-call experience on a production custody or payments system that moved real money. You have written a post-mortem that changed the architecture afterwards.

Articulates a leadership philosophy unprompted, with at least one example of changing your mind on it. We want a leader who reflects, not a leader who recites.

Comfortable working with a hands-on, technical CTO who will continue to own architecture and technical strategy while transferring operational engineering authority to you across the first 180 days.

English fluency. Written and verbal.

Nice-to-haves

Direct regulator-interface experience as the engineering-side representative (SAMA, NYDFS, FCA, MAS, VARA, OCC, FINMA, BoE).

Authored or contributed to a public technical standard, RFC, IACR paper, or audit-facing trust-center publication.

Open-source authorship in custody-relevant primitives (MPC libraries, signing services, key-management tooling).

Has run an acquisition integration: M&A engineering diligence and post-deal team merge. Has shipped at least one engineering re-org without losing more than two Senior-plus engineers. Comfort with Go (our primary backend language) and Rust (custody-critical paths).

Has held a Head of Engineering or VP Engineering title before. Equally strong: a current Director of Engineering, Senior Engineering Manager, Principal Engineer, or Staff IC ready to step up.

This is not the right role if

Your background is pure consumer product, dApp UX, frontend, or trading-app engineering without custody depth.

You are looking for a CTO seat. The CTO is here and is hands-on.

Quarterly visits to Riyadh may be required.

You require a non-compete waiver longer than six months from a current digital-asset custody role. You are uncomfortable with the level of regulator scrutiny that comes with running a custody business in the GCC.

Stack

Backend: Go primary, with Rust on custody-critical paths. Some TypeScript.

Data: Aurora Postgres, ClickHouse. Temporal for orchestration.

Cryptography: in-house MPC stack, HSM integrations, multi-chain signing service. Chains: Bitcoin, Ethereum and L2s, Solana, with an active onboarding queue.

Infra: AWS, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions CI, Terraform.

Security posture: SOC 2 Type II in motion, SAMA-aligned controls, dual-control workflows, future ISO 27001 readiness.

AI-assisted engineering. AI tooling is a default expectation, not an experiment. Engineers and engineering leaders use it across coding, code review, documentation, and operations. We track adoption.

Why join us:

A foundational seat in the GCC's emerging digital-asset infrastructure platform.

Direct ownership of the engineering organization you help build, with founder-level access.
A real custody platform moving institutional capital today, not a research prototype.
Headquartered in Riyadh, at the center of the most ambitious regional financial expansion in the world.