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.
Requirements
- 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.
- Evolve the engineering delivery framework - sprint cadence, definition of done, code review standards, and release processes
- 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
- 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
- Evolve and implement out the firm's AI-assisted development strategy
- Provide architectural guidance on model integration, data pipelines, and inference infrastructure
- 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
- 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
- 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
Benefits
- 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
