Head of Delivery Engineering and Quality, Fintech, Cyprus

Head of Delivery Engineering and Quality, Cyprus

Reports to: Chief Technology Officer
Team: around 100 software and QA engineers

About the opportunity

Our client has built a strong global brokerage business. Its clients trade foreign exchange (FX), crypto and other instruments, and it is regulated in multiple jurisdictions. The next step is bigger: a global fintech platform where trading, investing and other services sit in one ecosystem, on technology the group owns.

Technology is at the centre of that plan. For years the tech team mainly supported the business. Now it is expected to lead growth, and the group is rebuilding how it works to match. That means product teams, common engineering standards, automated quality gates, and AI used across the development process. A lot of this is started and not finished. Finishing it, and making it work at scale, is this job.

The role

This is a deeply technical leadership role. You own the engineering standards, the technology stack and the automated delivery system that every change passes through: code, review, build, test, security checks and release. Your part is how the software is built and how its quality is proven.

The technology heads and the Head of QA report to you. You help them establish shared technical standards, tools and pipelines to deliver efficiently.

Quality and automation are to be built into this system from the start, with agentic AI doing a significant part of the work. Agents can:

• review code against the standards
• check that a change respects the agreed contracts
• write and maintain tests
• prepare release notes and sort incidents

You decide where each agent sits, what it is allowed to do, and where a person has to approve. Developers and QA engineers should have AI tools they trust, used within the security rules.

What you will do

• Set and maintain the standards for the Python back end, Angular front end and Flutter mobile, together with the heads of the engineering streams and their teams. This covers coding style, typing, linting, repository structure, dependency rules and versioning. Every standard that can be checked automatically is checked in the pipeline.
• Own the technology stack: drive innovation, set standards, remove bottlenecks, improve delivery KPIs and automate.
• Make contracts the base of development: between services, between front end and back end, and with AQA.
• Build one pipeline standard for all services with DevOps. Quality gates block on failure, including SonarQube code analysis and test coverage. The main repositories move to trunk-based development, with feature flags and one build promoted through all environments.
• Move QA to quality engineering. Automated tests run on every merge and stop the release when they fail, with a target of 80% automated testing. QA engineers shift to test design, risk analysis and reviewing what the test agents produce.
• Roll out AI across engineering: coding assistants and agents for developers, test agents for QA, and automated review against the standards. Measure the effect against a baseline and keep what works.
• Build security and compliance into the pipeline with the CISO. The pipeline should produce the evidence auditors ask for: who changed what, what was tested and who approved it. The group is in scope of the EU Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and ISO/IEC 27001 certification.
• Keep the architecture consistent with the architects. This means architecture decision records, automated checks on dependencies between modules, and a visible technical debt register with time planned to reduce it.
• Measure engineering delivery from system data: lead time, deployment frequency, change fail rate, recovery time, rework and escaped defects. Use the numbers to decide what to fix next, and report to leadership in plain terms.

People and engineering culture

This is a leadership role as much as a technical one. You hire and develop team leads, handle performance, and make the difficult people decisions when they are needed. The same standards apply to in-house engineers and to engineers from delivery partners.

You will also build an engineering culture that good engineers want to join. Some of it exists and some you will introduce:

• component mentors: a senior engineer for each key component who approves changes to it as the GitHub code owner, keeps its documentation current and coaches others who work on it
• career tracks for engineers and QA, including a technical path that does not require becoming a manager
• design reviews for significant changes
• blameless post-incident reviews, technical demos, internal tech talks and communities of practice across teams
• onboarding that gets a new engineer to a first production change within the first weeks

What you bring

• 12+ years in software engineering, including 5+ years leading organisations of 20 or more people through team leads or managers.
• Strong hands-on Python. You still read and review production code, and the interview includes a code review.
• Working knowledge of TypeScript and JavaScript, ideally with Angular and Flutter.
• Engineering standards, CI/CD pipelines and quality gates that you designed and enforced across many teams, with before and after numbers you can share.
• API design and contract-first development: OpenAPI, versioning, backward compatibility and contract testing.
• A QA function you moved from mostly manual testing to automation, using tools such as pytest, Playwright or Selenium.
• AI coding tools or agents you put into a team's daily work, with security and review rules, and measured results.
• Good knowledge of AWS, containers, Kubernetes and infrastructure as code, plus solid architecture judgement.
• Delivery in a regulated industry, ideally financial services: change control, segregation of duties and audit evidence.
• Clear English. You can explain a technical trade-off to engineers from many countries and to non-technical executives.

Also useful

• Trading, brokerage, payments or crypto platforms
• Event-driven systems and event contracts, for example AsyncAPI
• Platform engineering
• Software supply-chain security, such as software bills of materials and signed builds
• Mobile release pipelines for iOS and Android
• Experience managing outsourced engineering partners, contracts and budgets

What you get

You report to the CTO and work directly with the executive team. You have a clear mandate to rebuild how engineering delivery works across the group.

Send your CV in confidence. All applications are handled by Emerald Zebra.