Head of Development

About R77 Global

R77 Global is a talent advisory partner connecting high-calibre professionals with ambitious organisations across iGaming, fintech, payments, financial services, technology and Web3. We represent opportunities with discretion and give candidates a clear, honest view of the role, its expectations and the environment they would be joining.

The opportunity

R77 Global is supporting our client in appointing a hands-on Head of Development to lead the technical direction, reliability and continued evolution of a complex financial technology platform.

The platform supports banking, payments, investment services, order management and in-house matching capabilities, alongside modern ML and LLM infrastructure. This is a senior technical leadership role for someone who is comfortable working close to money movement, transaction integrity and production systems where correctness is essential.

You will combine engineering leadership with hands-on systems thinking: guiding the team, shaping technical standards, challenging architecture and taking ownership when production behaviour does not match expectations. This is not a front-end leadership post or a ticket-management role.

The role

The Head of Development will have meaningful influence over engineering standards, platform resilience, technical risk and the future growth of the development function. The successful person will be expected to understand the running system, make evidence-led decisions and ensure changes protect the integrity of the wider financial platform.

R77 Global Head of Development

R77 GLOBAL | OPPORTUNITY BRIEF

Key responsibilities

Technical leadership and direction

• Own the technical direction and engineering standards across the core platform.
• Provide hands-on guidance, mentoring and constructive challenge to engineers working across multiple services and repositories.
• Review architectural decisions and production changes affecting financial integrity, system performance, resilience and recovery.
• Translate business priorities into a practical technical roadmap, balancing platform development with reliability and risk reduction.

Platform reliability and production ownership

• Lead the investigation and resolution of complex production incidents across ledger, order-management, matching, payment and supporting services.
• Trace transactions and failures across process boundaries, using logs, traces, data and network evidence to confirm the real cause.
• Improve observability, incident response, recovery procedures and post-incident learning.
• Define clear operational controls for stateful services and systems where a restart, retry or deployment could affect financial or order integrity.
• Champion small, measured and targeted fixes rather than unnecessary architectural change.

Core financial and distributed systems

• Protect the reliability and integrity of the platform's ledger, order-management and matching capabilities.
• Guide technical decisions involving concurrency, binary protocols, clustered services, deterministic processing, replay and recovery.
• Ensure the engineering team understands the operational difference between stateless applications and stateful financial systems.
• Work confidently across Linux, Kubernetes and event-driven infrastructure, including the safe operation of stateful workloads.

Team and stakeholder leadership

• Develop engineering capability through mentoring, code and design reviews, clear expectations and disciplined technical discussion.
• Work closely with executive leadership, product, operations and security to communicate technical risk and agree priorities.
• Support the continued growth of the development function, including future hiring and the evolution of team structure.

What we are looking for

Essential experience

• Substantial commercial experience with C and/or C++ in production environments where memory layout, object lifetime, concurrency and failure behaviour are explicit.
• Experience building, operating or diagnosing complex, high-performance or distributed systems.
• The ability and willingness to work extensively with modern Java services and low-latency messaging technologies.
• Strong Linux/Unix knowledge and proven production Kubernetes experience, including an understanding of stateful and stateless workloads.
• The ability to follow a request, event or transaction across multiple services, protocols and repositories.
• A strong record of diagnosing difficult production issues through measurable evidence rather than assumptions.
• Experience leading technical decisions, mentoring engineers and raising development standards.
• Clear, precise written and spoken English, particularly when communicating incidents, risk and technical decisions.

Particularly relevant experience

• Experience in one or more of the following areas would be highly advantageous:
• Matching engines, central limit order books, trading venues, exchange infrastructure or HFT.
• Financial ledgers, payment platforms, settlement, order-management systems or transaction-processing environments.
• Consensus protocols and low-latency messaging, including technologies such as Raft, Aeron, SBE, FIX or ISO 20022.
• Java, TypeScript/Node.js, Postgres projectors and event-driven read models.
• OpenTelemetry, structured logging and production observability.
• Deterministic numerical or ML pipelines and production LLM inference environments.
• Secure tool-calling, workload isolation, GPU capacity management or sandboxed execution.

What success will look like

Within the first 6-12 months, the successful person will be expected to have:

• Established clear technical ownership and consistent engineering standards across the platform.
• Improved incident investigation, observability and recovery readiness.
• Strengthened the reliability of the core financial, order-management and matching systems.
• Reduced operational risk around stateful deployments and high-impact platform changes.
• Developed stronger technical capability and accountability across the engineering team.
• Created a practical roadmap that balances resilience, platform evolution and commercial priorities.

Selection approach

The selection process will focus on real systems reasoning and production experience rather than framework lists or theoretical exercises. Shortlisted candidates should be prepared to discuss:

A complex production incident they personally diagnosed and the evidence that identified the cause.

Memory, concurrency, distributed failure, replay and recovery scenarios.

The safe operation of stateful workloads within Kubernetes.

How they would distinguish between failures in a core system, a downstream projection, a gateway and a data-delivery path.

Salary and package

The anticipated base salary is €80,000-€120,000 gross annually, depending on experience. There may be flexibility for an exceptional candidate with highly relevant matching-engine, HFT, exchange-infrastructure or low-latency financial-systems expertise. The wider package and working arrangement will be discussed during the process.

How to apply

Please apply through R77 Global with a CV that clearly describes the production systems you have owned, together with a short note outlining one of the most difficult production issues you have diagnosed and the evidence that led you to the solution.

Candidates selected for an initial discussion will receive a more detailed technical brief covering the platform, responsibilities and selection process. All applications will be handled confidentially.

Originally posted on Himalayas