Head of Engineering

About Coinflow Coinflow is the next-generation payment service provider revolutionizing global financial infrastructure with stablecoins, AI-driven fraud prevention, and instant settlement. Coinflow enables businesses to grow faster with instant settlement, fraud & chargeback indemnity, global pay-ins, multi-currency FX, and unified payouts. Founded in 2023, the company serves marketplaces, fintechs, remittance providers, gaming platforms, and ecommerce merchants worldwide. Since our seed round in 2024, we’ve achieved 23x revenue growth and scaled to multi-billion-dollar annual transaction volume. In response to this growth, Coinflow announced a $25M Series A https://coinflow.cash/blog/coinflows-series-a in October 2025—led by Pantera Capital, CMT Digital, Coinbase Ventures, Jump Crypto, and Reciprocal Ventures—accelerating our mission to power the world’s fastest-moving businesses with innovative, reliable global payments. Coinflow is proudly headquartered in Chicago, IL. Learn more at coinflow.cash http://coinflow.cash. ROLE OVERVIEW Coinflow is seeking a Head of Engineering to lead our engineering team and take ownership of day-to-day engineering, including prioritization, delivery, technical direction, and team health, that currently runs through the CTO. Coinflow is white-label payments infrastructure: card acquiring, payin/payout across numerous methods, hosted and embedded checkout, and merchant onboarding, operating in a heavily regulated environment where the bar for correctness, security, and reliability is high and non-negotiable. This is a player-coach role, not a hands-off management job. You'll be in the codebase shipping real work on critical payment paths while building and leading the team. You own the team's deliverables — when something is late, broken, or unclear, it's yours to drive to done. The first 6-12 months: this role is built around a handoff. Early on, you'll work closely with the CTO and ship alongside the team to earn context and trust. As you prove out judgment and delivery, more of the day-to-day — planning, technical decisions, team ownership — shifts to you. Success looks like the team running confidently under you while the CTO steps back from operational engineering. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES In the trenches (player) - Write, review, and ship production code on critical payment paths — you stay hands-on - Debug the hard stuff: production incidents, reliability gaps, performance and correctness issues - Set the technical direction and make the architecture calls that matter - Raise the engineering bar through code review, standards, and example Leading the team (coach) - Own delivery — break work down, sequence it, and make sure it lands - Mentor every engineer on the team, from senior to junior, leveling people up rather than just directing them - Manage and grow the engineers: 1:1s, feedback, performance, hiring, and the occasional hard conversation - Own the process — clear requirements before work hits engineering, real ownership per project (DRI), and a feedback loop that catches problems early - Be the point of accountability for the team's output to the founders - Report to the CTO on personnel matters — performance, team health, and people decisions run through you and surface to the CTO directly REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS - Senior engineering leader who is still a strong, current IC — able to hold your own in the codebase, not just review it - Track record owning delivery for a team: shipping real product, on a real cadence, with real accountability - Experience building process without bureaucracy — you know the difference between rigor and overhead - Comfortable in our stack: TypeScript/Node (Express, React), MongoDB, ClickHouse, Redis/queues - High bar for reliability, security, and correctness — you've operated where mistakes cost money - Direct communicator — you write things down and don't hide bad news PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS - Payments experience (acquiring, card networks, ACH, ch…