Head of IT (Risk & Operations)

About the Company

Our client is a Singapore-based, MAS-regulated financial services firm operating in the digital asset and securities space. The organisation is focused on providing institutional-grade brokerage and digital asset solutions while maintaining strong governance, security, and regulatory compliance standards.

As part of its growth and expansion strategy, the company is pursuing additional regulatory licences to broaden its digital payment and digital asset offerings. With a strong emphasis on technology risk management, operational resilience, and secure system design, the organisation is investing heavily in strengthening its technology, compliance, and operational capabilities.

This is an exciting opportunity to join a fast-growing fintech environment where technology, regulatory compliance, and digital asset innovation intersect. The successful candidate will play a key role in supporting the company's technology governance framework, licence-readiness initiatives, and day-to-day operational excellence.

Role Overview

This position combines IT management, technology risk, compliance, operational support, and hands-on engineering responsibilities. The successful candidate will play a key role in the company's regulatory readiness efforts by establishing robust technology governance practices, supporting the MPI licence application process, and ensuring systems, controls, and processes are secure, resilient, and audit-ready.

The role requires a practical, hands-on individual who can identify technology and control gaps, recommend effective remediation strategies, and directly implement improvements across applications, infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, access management, monitoring platforms, logging systems, audit mechanisms, and operational support tools.

You will collaborate closely with engineering, compliance, operations, and trading teams while serving as a primary technical representative during audits, regulatory reviews, and vendor engagements.

Key Responsibilities

Technology Risk & Governance

• Develop, maintain, and enhance the organization's technology risk management and IT governance framework in accordance with MAS TRM Guidelines and relevant regulatory requirements.

• Implement, monitor, and continuously improve critical technology controls, including:

  • Access management and privileged account controls

  • Change and release management

  • Vulnerability and patch management

  • Audit logging and monitoring

  • Backup and recovery processes

  • System resilience and availability controls

• Maintain risk registers, policies, standards, control documentation, audit evidence, and remediation records.

• Translate regulatory requirements into actionable technical controls, engineering deliverables, and measurable compliance evidence.

• Act as the primary technology liaison during audits, compliance assessments, regulatory reviews, and engagements with MAS.

Licence Readiness & Development Governance

• Lead the implementation of secure Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) practices and ensure the necessary controls and documentation are in place for MPI licence readiness.

• Establish and enforce standards covering:

  • Change and release governance

  • Segregation of duties

  • Production access control

  • Deployment approvals and oversight

• Review application code, infrastructure modifications, and production access activities from a security, resilience, compliance, and auditability perspective.

Technical Controls & Engineering Remediation

• Execute remediation initiatives to address technology risk and control deficiencies across applications, infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, IAM, monitoring, and operational tooling.

• Independently manage engineering enhancements from problem identification through implementation, testing, deployment, and evidence collection.

• Collaborate with engineering teams on larger transformation and remediation projects while ensuring regulatory and operational requirements are met.

• Strengthen platform observability, reliability, recoverability, and auditability through practical technical improvements.

Operations & Production Support

• Provide operational support for critical trading, settlement, and transaction-processing platforms.

• Proactively monitor system jobs, integrations, reconciliations, alerts, logs, and batch processes.

• Troubleshoot and resolve operational issues involving:

  • Failed or pending transactions

  • Deposit and withdrawal processing

  • Reconciliation exceptions

  • Settlement discrepancies

• Lead incident management activities, including:

  • Detection and escalation

  • Root cause analysis

  • Resolution coordination

  • Post-incident reviews

  • Regulatory reporting where necessary

• Support business continuity planning (BCP), disaster recovery (DR) exercises, backup and restoration procedures, recovery objectives, and on-call support processes.

Required Qualifications

• Strong understanding and practical experience with MAS TRM Guidelines and regulatory technology requirements, ideally within a MAS-regulated organization.

• Hands-on software engineering experience, preferably with Java and Spring Boot, including the ability to troubleshoot, modify, test, and deploy production systems.

• Proven expertise in diagnosing production issues using SQL, APIs, application logs, monitoring systems, and tracing tools.

• Experience implementing and managing technology controls related to:

  • Access management

  • Change and release management

  • Audit logging

  • Vulnerability management

  • Monitoring and incident response

• Solid knowledge of secure SDLC practices, CI/CD processes, IT governance frameworks, and operational support models.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including experience preparing policies, procedures, audit evidence, incident reports, and regulatory responses.

• Good understanding of digital asset and blockchain concepts, including wallets, blockchain addresses, deposits, withdrawals, and transaction processing.

• Experience working with relational databases and enterprise system integrations.

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct involvement in MAS licensing initiatives such as MPI, CMS, Payment Services Act, or similar regulatory programmes.

• Experience preparing organizations for MAS TRM audits, inspections, or regulatory assessments.

• Working knowledge of Payment Services Act requirements and Digital Payment Token regulations.

• Industry certifications such as CISA, CRISC, CISSP, ITIL, or equivalent.

• Technical experience with:

  • Java / Spring Boot

  • AWS (IAM, ECS/Fargate, S3)

  • Docker and container technologies

  • CI/CD platforms

  • Monitoring and observability solutions

  • Redis

• Exposure to financial services, securities trading, treasury, settlement operations, or digital asset ecosystems.

Jaspreet Kaur Sran (R22109724) 

JAC Recruitment Pte. Ltd. (90C3026)

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