Director of Engineering

Our Ascend vision is to create life opportunities with innovative digital services. We are operating in ASEAN, where we are able to help one of the world's largest populations of underbanked.

In 2017, we served over 30 million customers in 6 countries (Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines), and processed over 4.9 billion USD. This makes us by far the largest fintech company in SE Asia, and growing quickly.

As a member of our esteemed Engineering team, you will be helping to bring this vision to reality by leveraging scalable development patterns and modern cloud-native technologies. At Ascend, you will be part of an amazing team disrupting traditional banks while directly improving the lives of millions.

The director role is one of the most critical leadership roles in the organization and will have the responsibility for a technology group within TrueMoney Thailand engineering. Requirements include managing technology delivery and coordination across multiple business domains.

This position reports directly to the Head of Engineering in TrueMoney headquarters, Bangkok Thailand.

• Oversee and manage a team of developers who design and implement highly scalable and highly performant systems using best of breed web technologies in addition to Python, Java, C/C++, RDBMS, SQL/NoSQL databases on Unix/Linux platforms.
• Possess an understanding of cloud-native architectures, and be familiar with implementations involving service discovery, circuit breakers, client-side load balancing, and other architectural patterns related to elastic, highly available infrastructure.
• Establish the development teams responsible for creating a company culture which attracts, retains, and coaches other engineers.
• Foster a culture of innovation, and accountability.
• Manage and inform through data by creating a metrics-driven engineering organization.
• Proactive communicator with solid business instincts.
• Identify emerging technologies to create leading-edge banking products.
• Partner with peers to build strategies for execution, facilitate key decisions, influence and lead change where appropriate.
• Hold team accountable for delivering on commitments.
• Manage attrition, and raise the bar on hiring to increase engineering excellence.
• Provide a startup-like dynamic leadership model, managing geographically distributed development and engineering professionals towards a common goal.
• Providing vision and planning while designing and implementing solutions. Coordinating with multiple functional areas of the organization especially operations, product management and service functions.
• Manage the data software development cycle in a SCRUM/Agile environment, managing major and minor releases.
• Provide leadership and develop integrated application plans and roadmaps that address current state challenges as well as how to achieve future state targets.
• Serve as a point of escalation and drive resolution for conflicting issues within the application domain, while aiding in the architecture and design of application solutions that will meet business needs.
• Facilitate communication upward and across project teams including project status, justifications for variances, and technical information (e.g., architecture, design and implementation objectives).
• Serve as a focal point for other departments including IT on development needs.
• Be accountable for the ongoing support of the existing suite of applications and data offerings that make up the productions systems while delivering new features and capabilities within approved budgets and timelines.
• Organize concurrent project activities through the development of project plans and ensure delivery per committed development schedules.
• Utilize continuous improvement tools and competencies for optimal productivity.
• Interface with internal customers, external customers, IT infrastructure team, and key business stakeholders.
• Partner with business leaders and other key stakeholders to define business opportunities and to prioritize new projects based on predefined criteria (return on investment, productivity, compliance, etc.).
• Work with business and IT users to identify, communicate, and resolve resource allocation, scope, or budget/delivery timing conflicts.
• Participate in overall business technology planning.
• Develop department standards and best practices.
• Manage personnel activities of staff (i.e., create a culture of innovation, hire, train, complete performance appraisals, reward, motivate, enforce accountability).

• Bias for action goes deep on technology, fiscally conservative, builds trust.
• A confident positive leader having the backbone, but capable of agreement and committing.
• Experience in leading teams in building mission-critical applications from scratch, and decomposing monolithic applications into smaller services.
• Must have a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field preferred. An advanced degree is desirable.
• Primarily, strong expertise in design, develop and maintain systems involving multiple distributed databases.
• Must have a minimum of 15 years of technical experience in high-tech software development, with at least 7 to 10 years of experience in a leadership role managing mid- to large-sized development teams, including managing managers.
• Experience must include a proven track record of success delivering medium to large projects through the project lifecycle, managing large teams of project resources, and managing executive-level stakeholders.
• International experience.
• Must be able to manage multiple concurrent initiatives.
• Expert-level development experience with Python, Java, C/C++, RDBMS, No-SQL on Unix/Linux platforms.
• Expert-level