Head of Engineering | xpate

<p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>Role:</strong> Head of Engineering<br /><strong>Company:</strong> <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://xpate.com">xpate</a><br /><strong>Location:</strong> London or remote<br /><strong>Job Type:</strong> Full-time</p><p style="min-height:1.5em"><br /></p><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>About xpate</strong></p><p style="min-height:1.5em">xpate has been a card acquirer since 2019. It combines acquiring and banking for B2B clients only, with €100M+ in annual revenue. About 100 people work there, around 15 of them in engineering. HQ is in London, and the team is spread across Latvia, Cyprus, Serbia and Singapore.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">The business is changing. xpate is moving from direct sales to distribution through platforms and partners: embedded finance and Payfac-as-a-Service. The platform has to change with it. Tooling, data flow, processes and the release cycle all need a rebuild, and much of the workflow is still tracked by hand.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">xpate also wants to become AI-native. Guardrails go around the core – the data layer and financial data – so it can’t be lost, rewritten or broken. Everything else runs through an agentic harness on top, so non-engineering teams can build their own tools by prompting agents.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>What you will do</strong></p><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Lead the platform and organizational transformation from the inside, together with the current team.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Own the whole technical picture: infrastructure, architecture and vendors.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Replace the traditional PM → engineer handoff. Test the idea that engineering and product can work as one, with engineers talking directly to the business and domain experts.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Move code writing to LLMs with automated QA. Start where mistakes are cheap and reach the critical financial components later.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Hire engineers who talk to people and ask questions, not only write code. You can bring in 1–2 people who share the vision.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Focus on internal efficiency. The business sets the direction – the job is not to set a product or market vision of your own.</p></li></ul><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>First 6 months</strong></p><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Months 1–3: bring all data flow – customer, financial and manual – into one clear perimeter.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Months 4–6: build the harness on top, so non-engineering teams can prompt agents, create their own tools and run their workflows.</p></li></ul><p style="min-height:1.5em"></p><p style="min-height:1.5em"><strong>What you need to succeed</strong></p><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">You have built financial systems: ledger, reconciliation, processing, gateway, double-entry accounting. Ideally you wrote them yourself, and you know what a few cents of error cost at scale.</p></li><li><p style="