Leading European Fintech Scale-Up — Financial Technology

A Series B payments business had raised capital on the promise of shipping a new merchant platform within a year, then discovered it had no senior engineering leadership to build it. Three previous hires had declined at offer stage, and the internal team was carrying delivery risk it could not sustain.

Erdobar ran a retained executive search across four markets simultaneously, mapping 140 engineering leaders who had scaled payments infrastructure through comparable growth stages. Rather than advertising the roles, we approached candidates with the technical problem itself, which changed the conversation from a job description to an engineering challenge worth moving for. We also rebuilt the client’s offer structure after benchmarking revealed their equity package sat in the bottom quartile for the market.

A VP of Engineering, two Staff Engineers and an SRE lead accepted within eleven weeks.

Outcome: Four senior appointments in 11 weeks, the merchant platform delivered a month ahead of the investor commitment, and all four hires still in post two years later.