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 manageme…