Head of Development

About R77 Global

R77 Global is a talent advisory partner connecting high-calibre professionals with ambitious organisations across iGaming, fintech, payments, financial services, technology and Web3. We represent opportunities with discretion and give candidates a clear, honest view of the role, its expectations and the environment they would be joining.
The opportunity

R77 Global is supporting our client in appointing a hands-on Head of Development to lead the technical direction, reliability and continued evolution of a complex financial technology platform.

The platform supports banking, payments, investment services, order management and in-house matching capabilities, alongside modern ML and LLM infrastructure. This is a senior technical leadership role for someone who is comfortable working close to money movement, transaction integrity and production systems where correctness is essential.

You will combine engineering leadership with hands-on systems thinking: guiding the team, shaping technical standards, challenging architecture and taking ownership when production behaviour does not match expectations. This is not a front-end leadership post or a ticket-management role.
The role

The Head of Development will have meaningful influence over engineering standards, platform resilience, technical risk and the future growth of the development function. The successful person will be expected to understand the running system, make evidence-led decisions and ensure changes protect the integrity of the wider financial platform.

R77 Global Head of Development
R77 GLOBAL | OPPORTUNITY BRIEF
Key responsibilities
Technical leadership and direction

- Own the technical direction and engineering standards across the core platform.

- Provide hands-on guidance, mentoring and constructive challenge to engineers working across multiple services and repositories.

- Review architectural decisions and production changes affecting financial integrity, system performance, resilience and recovery.

- Translate business priorities into a practical technical roadmap, balancing platform development with reliability and risk reduction.

Platform reliability and production ownership

- Lead the investigation and resolution of complex production incidents across ledger, order-management, matching, payment and supporting services.

- Trace transactions and failures across process boundaries, using logs, traces, data and network evidence to confirm the real cause.

- Improve observability, incident response, recovery procedures and post-incident learning.

- Define clear operational controls for stateful services and systems where a restart, retry or deployment could affect financial or order integrity.

- Champion small, measured and targeted fixes rather than unnecessary architectural change.

Core financial and distributed systems

- Protect the reliability and integrity of the platform's ledger, order-management and matching capabilities.

- Guide technical decisions involving concurrency, binary protocols, clustered services, deterministic processing, replay and recovery.

- Ensure the engineering team understands the operational difference between stateless applications and stateful financial systems.

- Work confidently across Linux, Kubernetes and event-driven infrastructure, including the safe operation of stateful workloads.

Team and stakeholder leadership

- Develop engineering capability through mentoring, code and design reviews, clear expectations and disciplined technical discussion.

- Work closely with executive leadership, product, operations and security to communicate technical risk and agree priorities.

- Support the continued growth of the development function, including future hiring and the evolution of team structure.

What we are looking for
Essential experience

- Substantial commercial experience with C and/or C++ in production environments where memory layout, object lifetime, concurrency and failur