Acheron is a market maker holding a CASP license issued by the AFM in the Netherlands under MiCAr and with passporting in all EU countries.
Acheron provides liquidity services to digital asset issuers from their most embryonic stages and throughout their adoption cycle. It is our belief that market inefficiency is one of the factors preventing digital assets from achieving mass adoption.
We are seeking a high-integrity, structured, and growth-oriented Head of Technology to lead our engineering organization into its next phase of scale. Reporting directly to the CEO, you will serve as the organizational and technical anchor bridging executive business vision, trading operations, and engineering delivery.
In this role, your primary mission is to enable our engineering team and govern our production releases. Rather than acting as a manual deployer or creating deep technical designs from scratch, you will empower our young engineering team to own application architecture while you establish clear UAT staging environments, enforce automated CI/CD release gates, mentor internal talent, and front regulatory compliance (MAS TRM / European MiCA).
Key Responsibilities
1. Leadership, Culture & Talent Development
- Culture & Mindset Reset: Build a high-trust, positive, and solution-driven engineering environment. Eliminate operational friction and cynicism, fostering psychological safety and team accountability.
- Mentorship & Internal Promotion: Coach and elevate our engineering talent. Establish clear technical benchmarks and career pathways to identify, groom, and promote internal engineers into senior and lead roles.
- Pragmatic Prioritization: Act as the strategic filter for the team. Use structured frameworking (e.g., Important vs. Urgent 2x2 Matrix) to shield engineers from ad-hoc noise, balance commercial urgency against tech debt, and protect team focus.
2. Release Governance & Deployment Gatekeeping
- Production Release Gatekeeper: Serve as the ultimate approving authority for all production releases. Enforce strict, standardized release gates—requiring verified UAT testing, mandatory peer PR approvals, passing CI/CD automated test suites, and compliance checks.
- Segregation of Duties & 4-Eyes: Enforce programmatic dual-authorization controls under MAS TRM guidelines for production deployments, database migrations, and hotfixes.
- Environment Isolation: Oversee the setup and enforcement of firewalled UAT/Staging environments seeded with sanitized mock data, ensuring zero unverified code touches production systems.
3. Technical Oversight & Code Standards
- High-Level Technical Oversight: Maintain ultimate oversight across our backend microservices ecosystem (Go, Python, Rust), ensuring systems meet reliability and security standards.
- Architectural Review: Review technical design proposals drafted by engineers, evaluating them for security, scalability, and compliance before development begins—empowering the team to own feature design.
- Code Review Rigor: Establish and enforce peer code review guidelines, testing coverage thresholds, and static analysis checks to keep code quality consistently high.
4. Infrastructure Governance & MAS TRM Compliance
- Infrastructure Governance: Partner with the Infrastructure/DevOps team to co-own platform resilience, cloud standards (AWS/GCP), container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker), and automated disaster recovery protocols.
- Regulatory Authority: Act as the technical authority for regulatory audits, board-approved technical policies, and security assessments (MAS Technology Risk Management / MiCA).
- Access Control & Auditability: Enforce Privileged Access Management (PAM) and Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to eliminate unmonitored direct database access, ensuring all production changes leave an immutable audit trail.
Candidate Requirements
Experience & Leadership
- 7+ years in software engineering with 2+ years in a technical leadership role (Engineering Manager, Tech Lead, Lead Architect, or Head of Tech/Engineering).
- Experience working in a regulated fintech, digital asset, payments, or trading platform environment.
- Proven track record of mentoring junior/mid-level engineers, building a positive team culture, and establishing release discipline.
Technical & Architectural Profile
- Core Language Baseline: Hands-on background in Go (Golang) or Python, with the architectural breadth to review and govern code across a polyglot microservices stack (Go, Python, Rust).
- Distributed Systems Awareness: Solid understanding of modern backend architectures, transactional databases (PostgreSQL, Redis), analytical data layers (ClickHouse), and messaging queues (Kafka, NATS, gRPC).
- Release Discipline: Demonstrated capability setting up or enforcing UAT staging workflows, CI/CD automated test gates, and release governance.
Regulatory & Security Domain
- Practical familiarity with MAS Technology Risk Management (TRM) guidelines, ISO 27001, SOC 2, or equivalent financial technology security frameworks.
Mindset & Leadership Traits
- Enabler & Governor: Ability to empower engineers to write designs and code fast while holding a firm, unyielding line as the process gatekeeper for production quality.
- Pragmatic Prioritizer: Ability to filter work ruthlessly using clear frameworks so the team focuses on what actually matters.
- High Integrity: A positive, constructive approach to leadership with zero tolerance for toxicity or defensive communication.
Our Recruitment Philosophy
- Leadership, trustworthiness, and reputation are at the core of Acheron Trading's DNA. We seek individuals who are:
- Analytical thinkers capable of assessing and optimizing execution strategies
- Self-starters with the confidence to make informed trading decisions
- Trustworthy and accountable, ensuring reliability for colleagues and clients
- Committed to excellence, going above and beyond to uphold Acheron Trading's reputation
Our Offer
- Competitive salary
- A clear pipeline toward a permanent, full-time role upon graduation
- The opportunity to work with one of the most innovative and fastest-growing trading firms in the industry
How to apply
- Send your resume together with a brief introduction on yourself to [Confidential Information]
Note: we do not work with middle-men recruiters, any hire should be direct.
