Head of Engineering

A fast-growing crypto exchange platform | Location: Singapore (or Hybrid/Remote — update as needed)

Our client, a trusted digital asset exchange platform, is looking for a Head of Engineering to lead their product engineering strategy and execution. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who wants to build and scale the technology behind a high-growth crypto trading platform.

About the Role

The Head of Engineering will be responsible for leading product engineering strategy and execution for the organization, working closely with the executive team, product managers, and other stakeholders to ensure engineering efforts align with business objectives, market needs, and technical excellence.

You will build, manage, and mentor a high-performing engineering team, providing leadership across various product development initiatives. As a hands-on leader, you will oversee the entire product development lifecycle, from ideation to deployment, ensuring the delivery of robust, secure, and user-friendly crypto solutions.

What You'll Be Doing

Strategic Leadership

• Define and execute the technical vision and strategy for the platform, ensuring alignment with company goals
• Lead the engineering team to build scalable, secure, and high-performance features for the exchange, with a focus on availability, security, and usability
• Collaborate with executive leadership and product managers to create and refine the engineering roadmap, prioritizing key initiatives to drive business growth

Team Leadership and Development

• Manage, mentor, and inspire a team of product engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, innovation, and accountability
• Recruit top talent, develop engineering leadership within the team, and establish career development frameworks to grow internal talent
• Encourage cross-functional collaboration and ensure effective communication between engineering, product, UX/UI, security, and operations teams

Product Development and Delivery

• Oversee the end-to-end product engineering lifecycle, from ideation to implementation, ensuring features are delivered on time, on budget, and to the highest quality standards
• Provide leadership in the architecture and design of scalable, low-latency systems, ensuring high throughput for trading operations
• Drive continuous product improvements, responding quickly to market changes and customer feedback, while ensuring regulatory compliance and security standards

Platform Scalability and Performance

• Ensure the platform is optimized for scalability, with the ability to handle high volumes of transactions, low latency, and seamless performance during peak periods
• Champion best practices in software engineering, including automated testing, continuous integration, and monitoring
• Manage and improve the platform's infrastructure, focusing on high availability, redundancy, and disaster recovery processes

Security and Compliance

• Ensure that platform security is a top priority, implementing best practices and industry standards for data protection, anti-money laundering (AML), and know-your-customer (KYC) compliance
• Lead initiatives to continuously evaluate and enhance the platform's security posture, proactively identifying and mitigating risks
• Work with legal and compliance teams to ensure that product development and engineering are aligned with regulatory requirements

Innovation and Market Leadership

• Stay at the forefront of emerging trends in fintech, blockchain, and digital asset exchanges, driving the adoption of new technologies and practices
• Conduct research and development on innovative solutions to enhance the exchange's capabilities, such as enhanced trading algorithms, risk management tools, and blockchain integrations

Process Improvement and Efficiency

• Establish and refine engineering processes to enhance efficiency, transparency, and collaboration across teams
• Implement metrics and performance KPIs to measure the success of engineering initiatives and the overall product engineering function

What We're Looking For

Experience

• Minimum of 10+ years of experience in product engineering roles, with at least 5+ years in a leadership capacity managing engineering teams
• Proven track record of leading the development of broker-dealer trading systems or similar complex financial systems (e.g., quantitative trading systems, order books, risk management systems)
• Strong understanding of cryptocurrency and digital asset markets, trading systems, and exchange architectures is a significant advantage
• Experience building highly available, low-latency, high-performance financial applications

Technical Skills

• Expertise in software architecture and engineering best practices (microservices, APIs, distributed systems)
• Hands-on experience with modern programming languages (e.g., Ruby, Python, Go, Java, C++) and relevant tech stacks
• In-depth knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Familiarity with blockchain technology, smart contracts, and digital asset transaction systems