About the Company

Xapo Bank is a fully distributed team of over 160 employees working remotely from 50+ countries around the world. We are a Bitcoin-native, regulated bank headquartered in Gibraltar.

About the Role

We're creating the role of Head of Engineering, reporting directly to the CTO. This is a new function-level leadership role, built as we scale engineering across three product tribes: Growth, Payments, and Assets Under Management, each run day-to-day by an Engineering Manager.

You own how engineering operates: the standards, the practice, the people, and the delivery. You give the engineering function a single accountable leader for how we build software and for the bar we hold it to, working in close partnership with Architecture, Quality Engineering, Security, Frontend Engineering, and Platform Engineering.

This is a true function head, not a senior IC with a management title. You set engineering standards across the function and own the unified Software Development Lifecycle end to end. You own how material backend changes are reviewed, approved, and audited. You own the engineering tech-debt roadmap and the people leadership of the Engineering Managers who run delivery in each tribe.

We measure the function on predictable delivery: consistently shipping committed scope on committed dates, with a 90% target as the bar. A defect here can move customer Bitcoin and customer Dollars, under the scrutiny of two regulators. That raises the bar on everything engineering does — change management, incident response, observability, and audit-readiness are not overhead, they are the standard the role exists to uphold.

What You Own

• The unified Software Development Lifecycle: you define it, evolve it, and own its governance and enforcement
• Engineering standards and practice across the function: code review, retrospectives, internal quality discipline
• People leadership of the Engineering Managers: performance, growth, 1:1 cadence, and engineering hiring
• Backend change management: the controlled, audited process for material changes, with a regulator-ready trail
• The function-level tech-debt roadmap and engineering capacity planning
• Engineering incident response and post-mortems, and the closure of resulting action items
• The AI-first engineering standard across the function

What You Partner On

• Architecture standards — with the Solutions Architect, agreed at the Architecture Advice Forum
• The quality framework and quality gates — with the Head of Quality Engineering
• Security standards and controls — with the Security function
• Client-side engineering — with the Head of Frontend Engineering
• Infrastructure and observability — with the Head of Platform Engineering

Responsibilities

• Delivery predictability across the engineering function — accountable for the function consistently shipping committed scope on committed dates, per tribe and function-wide
• Engineering standards and practice — you set and enforce the engineering bar: code review standards, retrospectives, and the feedback loops that keep them healthy across the tribes
• People management of Engineering Managers — performance management, growth, 1:1 cadence, and engineering hiring across the function
• Unified SDLC ownership — you own and define the unified SDLC end to end
• Backend change management — you own the governance of our deployment pipeline and ensure 100% of changes generate a regulator-ready audit trail automatically
• AI-first engineering standard — accountable for driving genuine adoption of AI tooling across engineering: coding assistants, AI-assisted code review, and AI-assisted test generation
• Blocker clearance — accountable for fast escalation and resolution of blockers, in-sprint and in engineers' backlogs
• Engineering incident response and post-mortems — own the engineering function's response to production incidents
• Tech-debt roadmap — own the function-level tech-debt roadmap: prioritising remediation and tracking progress against plan
• Capacity planning — accountable for engineering capacity matching committed work
• Cross-department standard execution — implementing the quality framework, security standards, and architecture standards
• Engineering OKR ownership — rolled up from Engineering Managers, with function-level accountability sitting here
• Cross-functional initiative delivery — ensuring engineering does not become the blocker for initiatives spanning product, technology, and operational teams

Compensation

$120K-$200K

Location

Gibraltar - Remote (100% remote, work from anywhere)