Head of Engineering

About the Position

We are seeking a Head of Engineering to lead and develop our company's engineering function, manage the current team, and improve its effectiveness.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop the company’s engineering function, manage the current team, and improve its effectiveness.
• Build working alignment with the existing tech lead and define how responsibilities are split between roles.
• Establish clear delivery, planning, and technical execution processes; reduce dependency on micromanagement.
• Assess the current payment flow and, together with the team, build a plan for its safe modernization - preserving the correctness of money operations and business continuity.
• Assess the rest of the legacy architecture, form a realistic modernization plan, and organize phased refactoring without stopping the business.
• Assess how operations, access management, backup, and recovery currently work; identify material risks and propose realistic improvements.
• Determine which tasks the team can handle on its own and where an external expert or additional hire is needed (e.g. DevOps or security).
• Participate in architectural decisions and understand the consequences of technical trade-offs for the product and its scalability.
• Get hands-on with code and architecture, discuss decisions with developers, and help the team through difficult situations.
• Assess the need to strengthen the team, and build and justify hiring proposals to the founders.
• Build working relationships with the founders through open discussion, reasoned argumentation, and agreement on areas of independent decision-making.

Requirements

• Must have:

  • Experience managing an engineering / development function: Head of Engineering, Engineering Manager, Technical Director, Head of Development, Deputy CTO, or equivalent responsibilities without a formal title.
  • Experience managing a technical team (including experience sharing responsibility with an existing tech lead) and understanding of backend/frontend architecture.
  • Practical hands-on experience with money systems: payments and payouts, integrations with payment providers, balances and transaction statuses, reconciliation, handling retries and errors.
  • Experience working with legacy systems and technical debt, including modernizing a system (ideally including a payment flow) without stopping a business-critical product.
  • Ability to hold both the technical and managerial picture at once; experience working with limited resources.
  • Strong people management skills, ability to justify team growth with clear reasoning.
  • Good communication skills, ability to explain technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders.
  • Solid practical understanding of infrastructure, databases, and security: able to assess operations, access, backup, and recovery, spot risks, and propose realistic improvements; deep simultaneous specialization in DevOps, DBA, and security is not required - what matters is knowing what the team can handle itself versus what needs an external expert or a new hire.
  • Readiness to work in a hands-on environment: get into code and architecture, discuss decisions with developers, and dive deep into the team’s real problems.

• Nice to have:

  • Experience in startups or small product companies.
  • Direct experience in the poker / iGaming industry.
  • Experience working with external DevOps and security contractors (audits, pentesting, Red Team / Blue Team).
  • C# /.NET and/or TypeScript; understanding of Go, Java, or other backend technologies.
  • Professional technical certifications - not required, real practical experience matters more.

We Offer

• Real influence on how the company’s engineering function will look going forward.
• Opportunity to develop an existing small team, build processes, and reinforce it where needed - without having to overcome resistance from a large organization.
• A meaningful engineering challenge: modernizing the payment flow and the rest of the legacy architecture without stopping the business.
• Broad scope of influence at the intersection of engineering management, architecture, delivery, infrastructure, and security.
• A stable, established business in its niche, with the possibility of reviewing compensation as the role grows.
• For candidates interested in relocation: a legal path out of Russia, a bank account, and a residence permit as a first step toward the European market, with relocation support available.

About the Company

[Company description if present]