VP of Engineering

About Us

First Circle is a fast-growing, profitable SME neobank serving businesses in the Philippines and soon across Southeast Asia. We are scaling our product and engineering organisation — currently 25+ strong — and building the financial infrastructure that thousands of businesses depend on.

We have expanded from credit into payments & bank accounts, payroll, invoices, and salary loans. Over the coming quarters, we will rapidly expand these products and add corporate credit cards, savings products (for SME and consumer), and more. As we secure licenses in other countries, we are also preparing our platform for internationalisation.

Stage

Profitable

• 150% YoY growth
• $25-50m revenue

Responsibilities

As Head of Engineering / VP Engineering, you will be the most senior technical leader in the business, reporting directly to the CEO. You will own engineering output end-to-end: from system design and domain architecture to delivery velocity, team culture, and the platform decisions that define the next chapters of our journey.

This is not a role for a detached engineering executive. We are looking for a technically excellent leader who shapes architecture with their hands, raises the bar on every dimension of engineering quality, and builds the engineering organisation which will enable us to become the dominant SME NeoBank across Southeast Asia.

Product Velocity & Quality

Evolve the engineering delivery framework - sprint cadence, definition of done, code review standards, and release processes

Drive meaningful improvement in lead time, deployment frequency, and change failure rate (DORA metrics)

Balance feature velocity against technical debt with rigour and transparency

Partner with Product to co-own the technical roadmap, sequencing build decisions against architectural dependencies

Architecture & System Design

Define and enforce domain boundaries across a microservices landscape, including cross-service messaging patterns, event contracts, and data consistency models

Own data modelling standards and schema governance across services

Lead design reviews for significant architectural decisions: ledger design, transaction state machines, reconciliation, and authorisation flows

Build the architecture review process - lightweight enough to not slow teams down, rigorous enough to prevent expensive mistakes

Regulatory, Security & Non-Functional Requirements

Own the technical implementation of financial regulated

Lead PCI-DSS compliance engineering and scope management

Drive adoption of the Azure Well-Architected Framework across all workloads

Define and maintain SLA/SLO frameworks, on-call rotation design, and post-mortem culture

Own cloud cost governance, capacity planning, and tooling budget

AI in Engineering

Evolve and implement out the firm's AI-assisted development strategy
Stay close to the emerging agentic engineering landscape and make deliberate adoption decisions
Provide architectural guidance on model integration, data pipelines, and inference infrastructure
API, Integration & Vendor Strategy
Own the API design philosophy for internal and external-facing services
Hold the technical relationship with key infrastructure partners - issuer processors, core banking providers, cloud vendors
Define the integration pattern library and partner onboarding standards

Data Platform

Accountability for data infrastructure: pipelines, warehouse, and models feeding BI and regulatory reporting
Ensure data lineage, quality, and governance standards are fit for a regulated entity
Team Leadership & Hiring
Hire, develop, lead & manage engineering team leaders: own the org design as the team scales from 25+ to 100+
Drive hiring at all levels - define the bar, run structured processes, attract senior talent
Develop engineering culture: ways of working, documentation standards, incident response norms
Develop career pathways and performance frameworks oriented around A-players
Represent engineering to the board, in investor due diligence, and in regulatory interactions

Requirements

• Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Mathematics, or a related discipline
• Deep expertise in building financial technology - payments, lending, cards, or core banking
• Experience managing one or more engineering teams
• Proven track record of solving hard technical problems personally
• Proven track record hiring and retaining strong engineers
• Strong communication in English; ability to translate technical complexity for exec/board audiences

Strong preference for

• Deep familiarity with global fintech and/or Southeast Asia tech ecosystem
• Prior experience in a high-growth environment
• Hands-on Azure architecture experience
• Familiarity with card and payments infrastructure (issuer processors, scheme rules, clearing flows)
• Experience within a regulated entity or navigating a licensing process

Benefits

• Significant equity participation
• Competitive base salary
• Participate in annual leadership team outcome-based cash bonuses
• Direct line to the CEO and meaningful influence over company direction
• 25+ person engineering team that is already good, and wants to be great

A note on culture fit

We are looking for someone who understands that seniority means solving the hardest problems, not someone who manages through process and delegation. We care about your judgement, problem solving, how you lead from the front. You have the highest standards, getting annoyed when engineering quality slips. If that description makes you nod, we'd like to talk.

Visit website

Founded in 2016, First Circle is the fastest-growing fintech company in the Philippines, led by an ex-Morgan Stanley and ex-Bridgewater Associates management team.

First Circle offers SME financing and are building smart banking solutions for businesses.

First Circle is a trusted partner of the Philippine government and is the official Finance Partner of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI).We are also a pioneer data provider to the Credit Information Corporation (CIC) and the very first FinTech company to ever be licensed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the Philippines.