Chief Technology Officer

Chief Technology Officer (CTO) — CreatorFi Platform

Location: Manhattan, New York (in-office 3+ days/week)

Function: Executive Technology Leadership (Product Engineering, Platform/Infra, Security/Compliance, Data)

Reports to: CEO

Mission

Build and lead the technology organization that powers CreatorFi—a hybrid financial platform bridging traditional payment rails with decentralized systems—while shipping secure, compliant, and scalable products that underwrite, fund, and reconcile creator and rights-holder revenues across YouTube, Music, and Roblox.

What You'll Own

1)             Technical Scaling Strategy & Architecture

•                 Set the end-to-end technical vision for a hybrid financial system that integrates traditional payment infrastructure (e.g., PSPs, ledgers, reconciliation) with crypto/DeFi building blocks (custody, on-chain interactions, cross-chain bridges)

•                 Establish target architectures, patterns, and guardrails for platform services: auth, data pipelines, orchestration, observability, and multi-tenant admin experiences

•                 Make pragmatic build/buy/integrate decisions that balance iteration speed with reliability and regulatory requirements

2)             Productization & Delivery

•                 Translate business goals into resilient, sequenced delivery plans with crisp milestone definitions, WBS, and risk management—shipping predictably

•                 Drive audit-ready pipelines for underwriting and reconciliation (inputs, configs, model/version hashes, outputs) with clear exit criteria for every increment

•                 Maintain a high bar for design docs, PR quality, CI/CD health, and release readiness

3)             Data, Risk, and Financial Systems

•                 Oversee ingestion/normalization across heterogeneous data sources (partners, APIs), canonical schemas, reconciliation jobs, and risk/credit model integration

•                 Implement robust payment processing patterns (idempotency, ledgers), wallet infrastructure, key management, and cross-platform financial reconciliation

4)             Security, Reliability & Compliance

•                 Own security posture and SOC 2 readiness: control ownership, evidence collection, structured logging, change control, access reviews, and incident response

•                 Define SLIs/SLOs and error budgets; implement observability and alerting; enforce CI gates, automated tests, and security scanning across services

•                 Ensure regulatory compliance for both traditional and decentralized finance components (e.g., PCI-like practices, data handling, audit trails)

5)             Org Design & Leadership

•                 Build and lead a high-performing engineering org (backend, data, platform/infra, and blockchain subteams), with clear ownership, leveling, and career paths

•                 Hire and develop exceptional engineering managers and technical leads; mentor principal/lead ICs; foster a culture of technical excellence and velocity

•                 Create an on-call model, runbooks, and post-incident practices that continuously improve reliability

6)             Stakeholder & Partner Management

•                 Partner tightly with Product on roadmaps, success metrics, and trade-offs; communicate decisions and risks clearly to execs and non-technical stakeholders

•                 Lead technical integrations with external partners (e.g., MCNs, distributors, PSPs, custodians) and guide agency/contractor teams where appropriate

Required Qualifications

•                 10+ years in software engineering with 5+ years leading multi-team organizations (EMs, TLs, and senior ICs) in fintech or payments at meaningful scale

•                 Proven track record building and shipping payment infrastructure or fintech systems from the ground up—not just maintaining existing platforms

•                 Demonstrated experience architecting financial systems (traditional payment infrastructure + crypto/DeFi integration) with secure key/custody patterns

•                 Track record shipping reliable platforms: SLIs/SLOs, on-call, incident management, observability, CI/CD, and security automation

•                 Strong systems design and data architecture background: schema governance, reconciliation, lineage, and risk/credit model pipelines

•                 Executive-level communication: crisp design docs, clear trade-off framing, and effective stakeholder management across product, compliance, and partners

•                 Exceptional engineering leadership: ability to inspire, develop, and retain technical talent while maintaining high execution standards

•                 Deep conviction about the creator economy and its transformation of media, entertainment, and financial services

•                 Up-to-date on the most up-to-date agentic workflows and tooling

Preferred Qualifications

•                 Deep AWS expertise (IAM, VPC, KMS/HSM, ECS/EKS/Lambda, RDS/Aurora, S3, CloudWatch) and infra-as-code (Terraform)

•                 Hands-on fluency in one or more: TypeScript/Node, Python, or Go; comfort reviewing complex PRs and spiking critical paths when needed

•                 Payments/PSP integrations, ledgering, and reconciliation systems; SOC 2 Type II implementation; privacy/security best practices

•                 Web3 familiarity (EVM, smart contracts, bridge/DEX risks, custodial vs. non-custodial flows) and secure wallet/key management

•                 Data platforms (eventing, CDC, warehouse/lakehouse, dbt, OpenTelemetry/Datadog/Prometheus)

What We're Looking For

This role demands a builder who thrives in high-intensity, mission-driven environments. You're energized by hard problems, ready to work the hours necessary to ship world-class products, and passionate about empowering creators to unlock the value of their work. You're hands-on when needed, but know how to scale yourself through great people and systems. You're equally comfortable reviewing architecture diagrams, debugging production incidents, and presenting technical strategy to investors. Most importantly, you believe the creator economy represents a fundamental shift in how value is created and distributed—and you want to build the financial infrastructure that makes it possible.