Head of Research and Development, Fintech, Cyprus

Head of Research and Development
Location: Cyprus. Reports to: Chief Technology Officer

Team: a new innovation team you build and lead

About the opportunity

Our client has built a strong global brokerage business. Its clients trade foreign exchange (FX), crypto and other instruments, and it operates under regulation in several jurisdictions. The next step is bigger: a 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 and is now expected to lead growth. The main engineering teams are building the standards and pipelines to deliver at scale. That discipline is necessary, but it also makes testing a new idea slow. So the group is creating a team whose whole job is speed.

The role

This is a founder-type role inside an established, regulated company. You start the research and development team from zero, hire it and make it efficient. Then you and the team turn ideas into working products in hours, days or weeks: internal product prototypes, pilots and MVPs.

The team is small by design, and the expected impact is large. A pilot that works can become any of these:

• a new product for clients
• a new way to run part of the business
• a tool that saves time for many people across the group

The range runs from trading platform liquidity management tools to a web game. A pilot that does not work should stop early, cost little and leave clear data.

What you work on is open. Ideas can come from the business, from engineering, from clients or from you. To give a sense of the range, it could be any of these:

• an integration with a trading platform
• an AI agent that takes over routine work
• a new client feature
• an internal tool for engineers
• a trading game

You agree with the CTO what is worth testing next.

What you will do

• Hire two to three engineers who can each ship a whole solution alone, and set up a highly automated way of working.
• Build a delivery factory running on CI/CD and agentic AI. You write code and ship with the team, and most of your time is hands-on.
• Turn each idea into an experiment with a clear question, a time limit and a success measure, agreed with its business owner before work starts.
• Put a first working version in front of real users within weeks, and measure what happens.
• Close every pilot with a decision to scale, change or stop, and write down why.
• Try new technology before the rest of engineering adopts it, such as AI agents, frameworks, platforms and vendor products. Give a clear recommendation to adopt, wait or drop.
• Agree with the Head of Delivery how a successful pilot moves to production. It is either rebuilt to the group's standards, or hardened and handed over with documentation and tests.
• Keep a short, visible list of what is running, what it costs and what it has shown. Demo working software every one or two weeks.

Freedom and guardrails

You are free from most of the group's delivery standards. Pick the stack, the tools and the shortcuts that get to a result fastest.

A few rules stay fixed: security, client data and the AI usage policy. In practice that means:

• a separate sandbox environment
• no real client data without approval
• approved AI tools only

Anything that touches clients, production data or live operations goes through security review and change approval before launch.

Who we are looking for

A builder first. You have taken ideas to working products on your own, more than once, and you want to do it with more resources and real users behind you.

• Startup experience as a founder, co-founder or early engineer, or your own projects that shipped and had real users. Failed startups and pet projects count.
• 10+ years building software, with a record of delivering products end to end.
• Strong full-stack skills: back end (Python preferred), front end (Angular or another modern framework), mobile (Flutter is a plus), databases, APIs and deployment on AWS.
• Fast building with modern tools: AI coding agents every day, low-code platforms where they are faster, and ready-made cloud services. You know when a shortcut is fine and when it will cost later.
• Hands-on work with large language models (LLMs): agents, retrieval and tool use, and their limits in accuracy, cost and security.
• Business sense. You can sit with a dealer, a support manager or a client, understand what they need, and give them something they use the next week.
• Pilots or MVPs with real users, where the decision to scale or stop came from measured results.
• Integration with third-party systems, including poorly documented ones.
• Energy and self-drive. You start things without everything polished, and you finish them.
• Clear communication in English with engineers and business people.

Also useful

• Trading platform integration: MetaTrader 5, FIX protocol, price and liquidity feeds
• Fintech, brokerage or payments experience
• Game development
• Hackathon wins
• Open-source work that can be reviewed

What you get

• A new team to build your way, with direct access to the CTO and to business leaders across the group.
• Real users, a regulated multi-jurisdiction business, and real data within the group's rules to test ideas on. Few startups ever get this.
• The chance to see your prototypes become products and tools used across the group.

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