Founding Platform Engineer / Head of Technology

About the role

FTD LTD operates payment-integrity technology for acquiring banks, PSPs and enterprise payment providers. Our platform runs thousands of AI-driven browser agents that complete real customer journeys - registration through to deposit on merchant sites, so our clients can audit what actually happens on the sites they process for.

We are hiring our a senior engineering leader to architect, build and own the future of our platform end to end. You will make the core technology decisions of the production systems yourself, and recruit and lead the engineering team as we scale. At its core this is a distributed-systems and browser-infrastructure challenge - thousands of real browsers behaving like genuine users to complete live transactions against active defenses - a systems and execution problem, not a data or analytics one. This is a founding, hands-on role - you build first, lead second.

What you will work on

• The orchestration core that runs thousands of concurrent browser agents reliably and at low cost per session
• The browser fleet on Playwright / Chromium and Chrome DevTools Protocol - session lifecycle, resource density, crash recovery, throughput
• Human-realistic agents - behavioral emulation, fingerprint and stealth management, proxy and residential-IP routing - so each audit reflects a genuine user journey and cannot be evaded by merchants whitelisting known auditors
• Self-healing, LLM-driven automation of heterogeneous registration, verification and deposit flows across sites that change constantly
• A computer-vision layer - visual page understanding, element and challenge detection, and screen-based verification of flow state (for example, confirming a completed deposit) where the DOM alone is unreliable
• Scheduling, orchestration, retry and workload-management systems for high-volume audit runs
• Backend APIs, structured data capture and tamper-evident audit trails for client reporting
• Observability, monitoring and success-rate analytics across the fleet
• The architecture from concept to production - then the team behind it

What we are looking for

• 8+ years building production software, with genuine ownership of architecture and technology decisions
• Proven distributed-systems and cloud-native experience running at scale
• Strong backend engineering in Python or modern C++
• Hands-on large-scale browser automation in production - Playwright, Puppeteer, Chromium, Chrome DevTools Protocol - driving real browsers at high concurrency (large-scale scraping or crawling counts as relevant adjacent background)
• Real exposure to bot-detection and anti-fingerprinting - Cloudflare, DataDome, reCAPTCHA / hCaptcha / Turnstile, TLS/HTTP fingerprinting, proxy and IP management
• Applied computer vision or image-based ML - OCR, object and element detection, visual classification - ideally in an automation, CAPTCHA or anti-bot context
• Docker and Kubernetes in production, strong Linux, networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, sockets, HTTP, WebSockets)
• Excellent debugging, profiling and performance / cost optimization
• Independent, remote-ready, with strong written communication

Strong plus

• AI agents / LLM integration for autonomous web workflows
• CAPTCHA-solving pipelines and residential-proxy infrastructure
• PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka / NATS; AWS / GCP / Azure; Terraform / IaC; Prometheus / Grafana / OpenTelemetry
• Payments, fintech, fraud, ad-verification or bot-detection background - either side of the detection line

Why FTD

• Founding engineering role - your architecture will lead the future of our platform
• One of the hardest intersections in the industry: AI agents, browser infrastructure at scale, and payments
• Small, senior team, direct access to founders, no bureaucracy
• Hybrid role with flexible hours
• Competitive compensation plus meaningful equity