Date: October 24 2025
Author: Code & Pepper

I’ve been building software for decades, and for the past couple of years, my world has been FinTech. As the CEO of a software house, I talk to founders and CTOs every week, and the conversation always lands on the same, frustrating point: “I just can’t find good engineers.”

I get it. But after seeing this play out time and again, I’m convinced we’re framing the problem wrong. This isn’t a generic “talent shortage.” It’s a shortage of a very specific, new kind of specialist that the modern financial world demands.

We’ve all been posting jobs for “Senior Backend Engineers” and hoping they can “pick up the domain.” That strategy is broken. The game has changed, and we need to change with it.

The Myth of the “Learnable” Domain

Five years ago, you could hire a brilliant generalist developer, hand them a book on finance, and expect them to succeed. The “domain” was mostly business logic. Today, that’s a dangerous assumption.

The fintech domain is no longer just a set of business rules; it’s a web of non-negotiable technical constraints. A mistake isn’t a bug; it’s a potential multi-million-dollar liability, a visit from the regulator, or a catastrophic loss of customer trust.

Hiring a great backend engineer to build a payments ledger is like hiring a brilliant novelist to write a legal contract. The fundamental skills of language and structure are there, but the domain-specific risks, rules, and irreversible consequences are entirely different. One misplaced comma doesn’t create a plot hole; it invalidates the entire agreement.

The Anatomy of a True Fintech Engineer

So, what does this new specialist look like? When my team at Code & Pepper screens for top engineers around Poland, we look for a mindset that goes far beyond a typical tech screen. We look for engineers who have internalized the unforgiving nature of money.

They exhibit a few key traits:

• A Defensive Coding Reflex. A fintech engineer doesn’t just build for the happy path. Their default assumption is that everything will fail. They instinctively build for when the PSP is down, the network is flaky, or a user is trying to double-submit a payment form. Idempotency isn’t a feature they add later; it’s a fundamental reflex, like breathing.

   

• An Understanding of Money’s Statefulness. They know that money isn’t just a FLOAT in a database. It moves through a precise state machine: authorized, captured, settled, refunded. They can model this complexity accurately and understand that concepts like double-entry bookkeeping are not just for accountants—they are core computer science patterns for ensuring data integrity.

   

• Compliance-as-Code Thinking. They see regulations like PCI DSS v4.0 or DORA not as a CISO’s problem, but as engineering requirements. They build systems that produce immutable audit logs by design and can speak confidently about how their architecture ensures provable resilience, not just theoretical security.

   

• Product-Oriented Security. They are paranoid in a productive way. They think about attack vectors constantly. But more importantly, they understand that security is a product feature. A clunky, 30-second SCA flow might be “secure,” but it destroys conversion rates. A true fintech engineer knows how to balance ironclad security with a seamless user experience.

So, How Do You Actually Build Your Team?

Recognizing the profile is one thing; hiring for it is another. As I see it, you have three realistic paths.

1. Cultivate Them In-House (The Long Game)

This is the purist’s approach: hire smart, promising engineers and invest heavily in mentoring them on these specific fintech patterns. It’s the best way to build deep, long-term institutional knowledge around your core IP.

• The Upside: You get a team that is 100% aligned with your culture and business.
• The Downside: It’s incredibly slow, expensive, and you absorb the full cost of their learning curve, including the mistakes they will inevitably make.

2. Hire Proven Specialists (The Accelerator)

The second path is to only hire engineers who already have this specialized DNA. This is the problem my team and I set out to solve when we built our company. We saw that if you bring together engineers who have already built and fixed payment systems, lending platforms, and compliance engines at other fintechs, you create a powerful accelerator.

This approach de-risks development and dramatically shortens time-to-market. Whether you do this by hiring individual contractors or engaging a specialized partner, the goal is the same: to inject proven expertise directly into your team.

3. The Hybrid Model (The Pragmatic Path)

This is often the most effective strategy. Use your core in-house team to focus on what makes your business unique, your proprietary algorithms, your user experience, and your market strategy.

For the complex but standardized fintech plumbing (like payment gateway integrations, ledger systems, or compliance tooling), augment your team with outside specialists. This allows your best people to focus on innovation, not on reinventing the wheel. Services like team augmentation are designed specifically for this model, giving you access to fintech-specific expertise exactly when you need it.

A Final Thought

The talent you need is out there, but they aren’t responding to generic job descriptions for “Senior Engineers.” They’re looking for hard, interesting problems in a domain they understand. Frame the challenge correctly, hire for a fintech mindset, and you’ll find them.

As a fellow founder and engineer in the FinTech Circle, I’m always happy to trade notes on what’s working. The challenges we face are unique, and the best way forward is to learn from each other.

Karol Gajos is the CEO of Code & Pepper, a software development partner for FinTech and HealthTech companies