Founding Engineering Manager - Crypto & Digital Payments

Location: Remote (APAC) | Open to candidates in the Philippines, Singapore, and Hong Kong We're partnering with a well-funded digital financial services company to hire a Founding Engineering Manager for a brand-new crypto and digital payments initiative. This is a unique opportunity to join at the earliest stage of a new business, leading the technical direction, building the engineering team, and delivering secure, scalable financial products in a regulated environment. What You'll Do Lead the end-to-end engineering delivery for a new crypto and payments platform. Build and grow the founding engineering team, setting a high bar for hiring and engineering excellence. Define technical architecture and make key build-versus-buy decisions. Design and implement integrations with third-party platforms and infrastructure providers. Partner closely with Product, Design, Compliance, and business stakeholders to deliver customer-focused solutions. Establish engineering best practices, CI/CD, observability, and modern software development processes. Mentor engineers while remaining hands-on with architecture and technical decision-making. What We're Looking For 10+ years of software engineering experience with at least 4 years leading engineering teams. Experience within crypto, blockchain, digital assets, fintech, digital banking, or payments . Proven experience delivering production systems in regulated financial environments. Strong software engineering background with modern backend or full-stack technologies (Java and/or Python preferred) . Experience designing distributed systems, APIs, and cloud-native applications. Ability to build and scale high-performing engineering teams. Strong stakeholder management and communication skills. Nice to Have Wallet, custody, or blockchain infrastructure experience. MPC, HSM, or digital asset security knowledge. Experience with KYC, AML, fraud, payments, or ledger platforms. AWS cloud and serverless architecture. Experience building greenfield products or leading engineering teams in high-growth environments. Why Join? Founding engineering leadership opportunity. Build a new product and engineering organisation from scratch. High ownership with significant influence over technical strategy. Competitive compensation package, performance bonus, and equity. Flexible remote working within APAC. Opportunity to work on innovative products at the intersection of fintech and digital assets. If you're passionate about building scalable financial products and leading engineering teams in a fast-paced environment, we'd love to hear from you.