Lead Software Engineer - Payments & FinTech Innovation

Cape Town, Western Cape
Permanent
Full-time

7 days ago

Job Description:This is not just another engineering job. It’s an opportunity to become a founding member of a high-growth FinTech venture that is already live, funded, and led by proven experts who have built and scaled successful businesses in Europe and Africa. You’ll be joining at a pivotal stage, where the foundations are solid, the vision is clear, and the potential impact is immense.You won’t be a small cog in a big machine. You’ll be a key voice, shaping both the technology and the culture of a business that’s re-imagining how merchants optimize payments across global providers.What You’ll Be BuildingThe platform is already powering real customers and is architected on modern engineering principles:

Cloud-native stack running on Google Cloud

Infrastructure-as-Code and containerization

A payment routing engine that intelligently selects the most efficient, lowest-cost path for each transaction

Deep integrations with PSPs and card schemes, with a roadmap expanding into analytics, automation, and AI-driven optimization

Your mission: Scale this platform to support hundreds (and eventually thousands) of customers while maintaining speed, resilience, and innovation.What You’ll Do

Own and evolve critical parts of the backend architecture, ensuring scalability and robustness

Contribute across the stack - mostly backend, but with enough full-stack exposure to deploy and fix across the platform when needed

Work closely with industry experts and directly with customers, translating their needs into elegant, resilient solutions

Leverage payments data to experiment with ML/AI models that forecast, optimize, and deliver real-time insights

Be part of a lean, senior engineering team where initiative, directness, and ownership are celebrated

Mentor future hires and help shape a Cape Town engineering hub from the ground up

RequirementsWhat We’re Looking For:

Strong experience as a senior backend or full-stack engineer, ideally in Python, with exposure to modern practices (cloud-native, Docker, infra-as-code)

Payments or PSP experience is highly valuable - especially if you’ve touched PCI, tokenization, or transaction routing at scale

Curiosity and capability to work with data science/ML models, even if not as a specialist

A communicator and collaborator who thrives in flat, high-trust, international teams

Someone who takes initiative, spots problems, and solves them without waiting to be told

A builder: not just of code, but of culture, best practices, and teams

BenefitsWhat’s In It for You:

Competitive package R110,000 - R125,000 p/m

Opportunity to work in Amsterdam during onboarding to immerse in the culture and codebase

Backing of experienced fintech founders and solid funding - no “idea stage” uncertainty

A direct path to leadership in Cape Town as the team scales

The satisfaction of building something that genuinely moves the needle in global payments

titc.io

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