Chief Technology Officer in Manchester

As Chief Technology Officer, you'll own the architecture and technical direction of Murmuration's platform. Reporting to the Group CTO, you'll design and build our CBS, payments, and data systems, amongst others, as well as hire and lead the engineering team, and make the early architectural decisions that the rest of the product will be built on.

About Murmuration: Murmuration is a new technology company building the core platform that credit unions run on. We provide the software, payments, and data infrastructure that lets a credit union offer its members modern digital banking without having to build or run the technology itself. Credit unions are member-owned and rooted in their communities, but many still operate on systems that are decades old, which limits what they can offer their members. We're building the alternative.

What you'll be doing:

• Own the technical architecture of the core platform: the ledger, payments, APIs, data, and integrations, designed for resilience, scale, and regulatory compliance.
• Turn the product roadmap into technical plans, weighing speed to market against long-term maintainability.
• Hire, lead, and develop the engineering team across full stack, platform/SRE, payments, data, and QA, and set the standards and culture for how it works.
• Make build-versus-buy decisions across CBS, payment rails, and cloud infrastructure, and manage the main vendor and partner relationships.
• Build security and compliance into the platform from the start, working with risk and compliance to meet the FCA, PRA, and PCI-DSS requirements that apply to credit unions.
• Own the cloud strategy, CI/CD, observability, and production reliability, and set and report against SLAs and SLOs.
• Set the technical standards for code quality, testing, security, and documentation across the team.
• Represent engineering to the Group CTO, the board, credit union clients, and regulators, explaining architecture, risk, and progress in plain terms.
• Own the technology budget and headcount plan, and report on delivery, cost, and risk.

What you'll bring to Murmuration:

• Experience as a CTO, VP/Head of Engineering, Principal Engineer, or Lead/Solutions Architect, with a strong hands-on architecture background.
• A track record of designing and running scalable, secure distributed systems in production, ideally in core banking, payments, or another regulated financial setting.
• Strong knowledge of cloud architecture (AWS, Azure, or GCP), API design, event-driven systems, and data architecture.
• Experience building and leading engineering teams from an early stage, including hiring and putting process in place.
• A good understanding of UK financial services regulation and security (FCA, PCI-DSS, data protection) and how to build compliance into a product.
• The commercial judgement to make sensible build-versus-buy and prioritisation calls in a startup.
• Clear communication, including with boards, clients, and regulators.

Standout candidates will also:

• Experience with credit unions, mutuals, building societies, or the wider financial inclusion sector.
• Experience building a multi-tenant SaaS or banking-as-a-service platform serving more than one financial institution.
• Familiarity with UK payment schemes (Faster Payments, Bacs, Direct Debit, Open Banking) and core banking providers.
• Experience taking a platform and team from first build through to ongoing growth.

Salary of £100,000 – £120,000 depending on experience. 30 days holiday per year plus Bank Holidays. Hybrid working from our Manchester office. Company pension scheme. An early, hands-on role building a new platform and team. Structured career path with support for ongoing learning and development.