Head of Engineering

Head of Engineering – Kamel Pay

Location:
Karachi, Pakistan

Reports to:
CTO

Type:
Full-time, senior leadership

About KamelPay

KamelPay is a fast-growing fintech company building digital financial products for individuals and businesses in the GCC and beyond. Our platform covers areas such as payroll, cards, lending, and corporate expense management, working closely with banks, processors, and other financial partners.

We are strengthening our technology leadership and looking for a Head of Engineering
to lead our engineering organisation, grow our teams, and ensure high-quality delivery across multiple products.

Role Overview

The Head of Engineering is responsible for:

• Leading and scaling the engineering teams across backend, web, mobile, QA, DevOps and data.
• Ensuring that KamelPay's products are delivered on time, with quality, and in a secure and reliable way.
• Providing strong technical leadership and partnering closely with the CTO, Product, and Business teams.

You will not be coding day-to-day, but you must be technically credible: comfortable reviewing designs, challenging implementation choices, and guiding teams towards good engineering decisions.

Key Responsibilities

1. Engineering Leadership & Organisation

• Lead the engineering organisation across multiple squads (e.g. core/backend, web/portal, mobile, DevOps, QA, data/analytics).
• Manage and mentor Engineering Leads and senior engineers, helping them grow into strong people and technical leaders.
• Shape and evolve the team structure as the company and product portfolio grow.
• Build a culture of ownership, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

2. Technical Oversight & Architecture

• Provide technical leadership and oversight across key systems and services.
• Work with the CTO and senior engineers to define and maintain technical standards, guidelines, and best practices.
• Review and challenge architecture and design decisions for critical components (performance, scalability, reliability, security).
• Help teams make pragmatic trade-offs between ideal solutions and delivery constraints.

3. Delivery & Execution

• Own engineering delivery across multiple product lines and projects.
• Ensure every major initiative has:
• A clear engineering owner,
• A realistic plan and milestones,
• The right mix of engineering, QA, and DevOps support.
• Run regular delivery/status reviews, surface risks early, and drive decisions to keep work on track.
• Work with Product to balance scope, timelines, and quality, and communicate trade-offs clearly to stakeholders.

4. Process, Quality & DevOps

• Define and improve engineering processes, including planning, estimation, code reviews, testing, releases, and incident handling.
• Ensure QA is embedded within teams and that testing and quality are part of the development lifecycle, not an afterthought.
• Partner with DevOps and platform engineers to maintain healthy CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and on-call/incident response practices.
• Encourage a culture of learning through post-incident reviews and continuous improvement.

5. People Management & Hiring

• Set clear expectations, goals, and growth paths for engineers and engineering leads.
• Provide regular feedback, coaching, and performance reviews.
• Work with the CTO and HR to define hiring needs and participate actively in recruitment and onboarding.
• Help create an environment where engineers are motivated, engaged, and able to do their best work.

6. Collaboration with Product & Business

• Work closely with Product Managers to turn roadmaps into executable engineering plans.
• Provide technical input into prioritisation and sequencing of work.
• Collaborate with Operations, Customer Support, Compliance, and other teams to understand real-world issues and incorporate them into engineering priorities.
• Communicate engineering status, risks, and decisions in a clear, concise way to non-technical stakeholders.

What Success Looks Like

• Engineering teams have clear ownership and deliver predictably.
• Major projects are shipped on time with acceptable quality and controlled risk.
• Technical decisions are well thought out and aligned with the company's long-term direction.
• The CTO has a clear picture of engineering health, risks, and capacity.
• KamelPay's engineering organisation is viewed as a strong, reliable partner to Product and Business.

Requirements

Must-Have

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, including significant time in an engineering leadership role (Head of Engineering, Director of Engineering, or similar).
• Direct experience in fintech or banking technology
  (e.g. wallets, cards, accounts, core systems, digital banking, lending, or similar).
• Strong technical background in building and operating complex software systems (e.g. distributed services, web platforms, APIs, integrations).
• Proven experience managing multiple teams or squads and delivering projects end-to-end.
• Demonstrated ability to review and challenge technical designs and guide architectural decisions.
• Experience defining and improving engineering processes (planning, releases, QA, incident response).
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, comfortable working with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Strong Plus

• Hands-on experience in payments
  (card issuing, acquiring, payment gateways, switches, settlement, or payment orchestration).
• Experience with GCC or other emerging markets in financial services.
• Experience leading distributed or multi-location engineering teams.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (e.g. AWS, Azure, GCP) and modern DevOps practices.
• Exposure to security, compliance, or regulatory requirements in financial technology environments.

Personal Attributes

• Technically credible and respected by engineers.
• Strong sense of ownership and accountability.
• Calm, structured, and pragmatic under pressure.
• Able to balance long-term technical quality with short-term delivery needs.
• Enjoys building teams and developing people, not just systems.

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