Head of Engineering

Summary: Joboko's client is seeking an experienced Head of Engineering to lead the technical strategy, software delivery, engineering organization, and production operations for a regulated financial technology platform. Operating out of Da Nang under a hybrid working model, this senior leadership role combines high-level strategic alignment with UK product/business leaders and meaningful hands-on technical involvement. You will build and scale the internal development center, manage external delivery partners, enforce strict financial data integrity and security, and govern the pragmatic adoption of AI across software delivery workflows.

• Define and lead the engineering strategy, target architecture, technical roadmap and priorities in line with product goals, customer needs and regulatory requirements.
• Own end-to-end engineering delivery, covering discovery, estimation, architecture, development, testing, release, production support and continuous improvement.
• Build and lead the engineering organisation in Vietnam, including team structure, hiring, onboarding, coaching, retention and career development.
• Lead internal engineers and external delivery partners, ensuring delivery quality, security, service levels, knowledge transfer and agreed outcomes.
• Provide strong technical leadership, including architecture and code reviews, technical decision-making, complex issue resolution and build-vs-buy decisions.
• Establish engineering standards and best practices across secure development, code quality, automated testing, CI/CD, release management, documentation and technical debt reduction.
• Own system reliability and operational readiness, including observability, performance, availability, capacity, backup & recovery, incident management and root-cause resolution.
• Embed security, privacy and financial-data integrity by design, covering access controls, encryption, auditability, vulnerability management, data protection and transaction accuracy.
• Partner with Product, Operations, Compliance and business leaders in the UK and Vietnam to shape requirements, manage trade-offs, communicate risks and ensure predictable delivery.
• Drive measurable engineering performance, covering delivery predictability, quality, reliability, security, cost, team health and customer impact.
• Lead responsible AI adoption across engineering and operations, evaluating AI-enabled opportunities with appropriate testing, monitoring, human oversight and security controls.
• Manage technology vendors and engineering suppliers, including performance, security, access, continuity and transition planning.
• Contribute to engineering budgeting and prioritisation, ensuring technology investment and cloud usage deliver measurable business value.

• Extensive software engineering leadership experience, with 5+ years managing product engineering teams or multiple delivery streams at Head of Engineering, Engineering Director, Engineering Manager or similar level.
• Proven experience building and scaling engineering teams, including hiring, developing and retaining strong engineers and technical leaders.
• Strong end-to-end ownership of complex software products, from architecture and delivery through production, with accountability for reliability, security and business outcomes.
• Strong system design and architecture knowledge across distributed systems, APIs, event-driven architecture, databases, caching, asynchronous processing, cloud infrastructure and observability.
• Hands-on experience with modern engineering technologies, ideally including TypeScript, React, [protected info], Fastify, PostgreSQL/Aurora, DynamoDB, Redis, AWS, containers, CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code.
• Strong understanding of financial-data integrity and secure systems, including transactions, reconciliation, audit logging, data retention, multi-tenant design, identity and access management, encryption and vulnerability management.
• Experience defining engineering metrics, service objectives, release controls and operational support models in high-availability environments.
• Experience adopting AI-enabled engineering tools or capabilities, with appropriate governance, security, privacy, evaluation and human oversight.
• Experience managing external engineering partners or distributed teams, including delivery governance, quality assurance, knowledge transfer and risk management.
• Strong commercial and strategic judgement, with the ability to balance delivery speed, quality, cost, operational risk and long-term maintainability.
• Strong communication skills in English, with the ability to work effectively with senior business, product, risk and operational stakeholders across cultures.
• Collaborative and accountable leadership style, with strong judgement, resilience and evidence-based decision-making.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice to Have

• Experience in fintech, banking, payments or other regulated industries.
• Familiarity with FCA, CASS, ISO 27001 or similar regulatory/security frameworks.
• Experience establishing or scaling an engineering centre or transitioning product ownership between organisations.
• Experience with additional AWS and engineering tools such as ECS Fargate, S3, SQS, KMS, CloudFront, WAF, CloudWatch, Datadog, Prisma, BullMQ or TanStack.
• Experience evaluating Generative AI, agentic workflows, retrieval systems or ML services for production use.
• Relevant AWS, security, architecture, data or delivery certifications.

Why Join Joboko's Client?

• Solid Financial Security & Compensation Package We offer a highly competitive executive compensation package engineered to match your technical leadership stature, featuring a guaranteed 13th-month salary and performance-driven annual bonuses. Furthermore, statutory social, health, and unemployment insurance co-contributions are calculated based on your 100% full gross salary in strict accordance with Vietnamese labor regulations, providing complete financial security.
• Comprehensive Health & Generous Time-Off Perks Your personal well-being is integral to our operations. You will be fully covered by a premium private healthcare plan. To ensure you have ample time to recharge, we provide an extraordinary time-off package featuring 20 days of paid annual leave plus 7 days of fully paid sick leave per year, alongside extra benefits recognizing your work anniversaries.
• Modern Work Culture & Career Acceleration Enjoy a balanced hybrid working arrangement based out of our modern office in Da Nang. You will thrive in a professional, engaging, and collaborative environment with direct access to UK business and product leadership. As the local engineering organization grows, you will have significant career development opportunities, supported by company funding for relevant technical, security, leadership, and financial services training programs, alongside free drinks and snacks in the office.