Chef de l'ingénierie | Head of Engineering

ABOUT VALPAY

Founded in 2022, ValPay is an all-in-one payment solution tailored to empower its partners’ software platforms. Designed for ambitious business owners wanting to focus on growing their business rather than the logistics needed to run it, ValPay helps companies prevent fraud, gain access to real-time reporting, and accept both online and in-person payments. ValPay’s PayFac-as-a-Service model gives its partners all the benefits of integrated payments while handling the heavy lifting.

ValPay is a subsidiary of Valsoft.

THE ROLE

As Head of Engineering, you will own the engineering organization at ValPay — how it is structured, how it delivers, and how good it gets. You will report to the CEO and work alongside product and go-to-market leadership to turn a talented, lean team into a predictable, high-performing engineering function.

This is a build role, not a caretaker role. ValPay’s engineering team has grown quickly and now needs someone to put real operating discipline behind it: a delivery rhythm people can count on, a management layer that holds, and technical standards that let the platform scale with the business — without losing the speed and hands‑on energy that got ValPay here.

We are hiring for trajectory. This role is scoped as Head of Engineering today, and it is designed as the potential path to Chief Technology Officer at ValPay. We would rather hire someone with the ceiling to grow into that seat and back them properly than hire the title and hope. What earns the step up is straightforward: a delivery organization that runs without heroics, a leadership bench you built, and a track record of technical judgment the CEO and the board can lean on.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Own engineering delivery end to end — planning, execution, release cadence, and quality — and make it predictable enough that the business can plan around it.
• Build and lead the engineering management layer: hire, develop, and coach engineering managers, tech leads, and senior/staff engineers, and put a durable structure beneath you.
• Partner with Product on roadmap feasibility, sequencing, and trade‑offs. Product sets the what; you own the how and the when.
• Set and enforce technical standards across the platform — architecture, code quality, testing, observability, and documentation — so the system scales as GMV and merchant count grow.
• Serve as the senior technical escalation point for integrations with core payments partners (Adyen, Fiserv), working complex issues to resolution and feeding what you learn back into the platform.
• Drive AI adoption inside engineering — in the SDLC, in developer productivity, and in the product where it measurably improves outcomes.
• Own engineering operations and reliability: on‑call, incident response, postmortems, and the SLAs a PCI DSS Level 1 payments platform has to hold.
• Partner with security and compliance to keep PCI DSS certification and multi‑jurisdiction obligations met as the platform expands.
• Be a steady presence under pressure, and build the organizational muscle for the team to handle incidents increasingly without you.

WHAT YOU BRING

• 8+ years in software engineering, including 4+ years leading engineering teams, with at least some of that time managing managers or tech leads.
• Proven experience building, structuring, and scaling technology organizations, ideally in high-growth environments.
• Experience hiring and developing engineering leaders, and the appetite to keep doing it.
• You can still apply hands‑on technical depth, you review architecture, you can go deep in a design review or an incident, and engineers respect your judgment. You are not expected to write production code day to day.
• Strong judgment on build‑versus‑buy, technical debt, and where to spend engineering capacity — and the ability to explain those calls in business terms to a non‑technical executive team.
• A track record of installing delivery process in a fast‑moving team without killing its speed: planning cadence, release discipline, on‑call, and the metrics to know whether it is working.
• Demonstrable ambition and ceiling. You want the CTO seat eventually and you can show what you have been doing to get ready for it.

NICE TO HAVE

Payments, fintech, or other regulated/high‑availability environments (PCI DSS, SOC 2, or similar).

Experience in a high‑growth or private‑equity-backed environment, or integrating engineering teams from acquisitions.

Experience with multi‑tenant platform or API‑first product architecture.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

In the first six to twelve months:

• A management layer is in place: engineering managers or tech leads owning their areas, with clear scope and accountability.
• Engineering runs