Chief Technology Officer (Fintech Startup)

About the role

Meridian Pay Labs is a Singapore-based fintech startup building API-first payment rails and a merchant-facing payments platform targeting SMEs across Southeast Asia. We are early-stage with seed funding and a product-market fit among local merchants; the CTO will shape both product and engineering culture as we scale.

The role expects a pragmatic leader who can design resilient cloud-native architecture, lead a distributed engineering team, and ensure regulatory and security compliance (MAS, PCI-DSS where applicable). You will work closely with the CEO, Head of Product and early commercial team to prioritise roadmap, execute releases and support fundraising due diligence.

This is an opportunity to join at an executive level with meaningful equity, fast decision cycles, and a chance to influence product, hiring and go-to-market plans. Candidates should be comfortable operating in a startup environment — hands-on when necessary, strategic for growth, and diligent about operational reliability.

About Meridian Pay Labs

Meridian Pay Labs is a payments fintech headquartered in Tanjong Pagar, Singapore. We provide multi-currency collections, merchant settlement and reconciliation tools for SMEs in Singapore and the region. The team is small, cross-functional and focused on reliability, security and rapid iteration.

What you can expect

• Equity participation and early executive role
• Central CBD office with hybrid flexibility
• Close engagement with product and commercial teams
• Clear roadmap with traction among SME merchants

Key responsibilities

• Define and own the technical strategy and architecture for a scalable, resilient payments platform
• Lead, recruit and mentor full-stack engineers, site reliability and QA engineers
• Drive microservices design, API strategy, cloud infrastructure and cost optimisation (AWS/GCP)
• Ensure platform security, data protection and compliance with MAS guidelines and PCI-DSS where relevant
• Partner with Product to prioritise roadmap, define technical requirements and estimate delivery
• Implement CI/CD, automated testing, monitoring and incident response processes
• Represent technical due diligence for investors and partners during fundraising and integrations
• Manage third-party vendor relationships (payment gateways, KYC providers, banking partners)
• Set KPIs for engineering performance, uptime and mean time to resolution (MTTR)

Requirements

• 10+ years in software engineering with 5+ years in senior leadership (Head of Engineering, VP Engineering or CTO) preferably at startups
• Proven experience building and operating payments, banking or financial services platforms
• Strong system design skills: microservices, event-driven architecture, API-first platforms
• Hands-on with cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure), container orchestration (Kubernetes) and CI/CD pipelines
• Practical knowledge of security, encryption, tokenisation and regulatory requirements (MAS, PCI-DSS familiarity highly preferred)
• Experience hiring and scaling engineering teams in Singapore / APAC timezones
• Excellent stakeholder communication: can translate technical trade-offs for non-technical leaders
• Eligible to work in Singapore and able to attend in-office meetings and occasional after-hours incident response

How to apply

Send your CV, LinkedIn profile and a short note describing your most relevant fintech or payments projects to [email protected]. Include examples of systems you designed and your role in scaling them.