The financial infrastructure is being rewritten in real-time, and if you're not hiring fintech engineers now, you'll be competing for them in six months when everyone else figures this out.
Stripe just launched Tempo—a payments-focused L1 blockchain built with Paradigm and design partners including Visa, Deutsche Bank, Revolut, Nubank, and Shopify. It's purpose-built for stablecoins and real-world payments, with features like ISO 20022-compatible payment memos and compliance hooks built into the protocol layer. This isn't a crypto company trying to do payments. This is a payments company rebuilding financial rails on blockchain infrastructure.
If you're building crypto infrastructure and your roadmap includes "institutional adoption," "enterprise integration," or "mainstream financial services," it's time to add a different type of engineer to your team. The talent you need isn't in crypto Discord servers—they're shipping production fintech systems at neobanks and payment processors. Right now, before this becomes obvious to everyone, you have a window to hire them.
Tempo promises to process over 100,000 transactions per second with sub-second finality—designed for business payments with predictable, dollar-denominated fees. This is modern fintech scale and UX expectations, not "gas fee roulette."
The institutional wave isn't theoretical anymore. Stablecoins process real economic activity. Tokenized deposits moved from pilots to production. Cross-border payments shift to blockchain rails because they're faster and cheaper.
The companies that dominate this phase won't just have sophisticated consensus mechanisms. They'll build blockchain infrastructure that delivers fintech reliability and UX while maintaining what makes crypto valuable. And right now, while most crypto teams hire exclusively for Solidity expertise, there's a narrow window to bring in the talent that actually gets you to institutional scale.
Stop filtering exclusively for protocol knowledge. Start looking for engineers who've shipped scaled, secure financial products where downtime costs millions and compliance isn't optional.
Modern Fintech Product Engineers:
From neobanks at real scale: Revolut, Chime, Nubank, N26 (millions of users, not thousands)
Built payment processing, multi-currency platforms, real-time settlement infrastructure
Architected backends where 99.9% uptime is the floor and "fix it next deploy" isn't acceptable
Shipped products where bugs cause regulatory issues and financial losses, not just user frustration
Payments Infrastructure Specialists:
Engineers from Stripe, Adyen, Square who understand high-volume transaction processing
Built real-time payment systems and settlement mechanics at scale
Know the complexity of moving money across currencies and jurisdictions
Created developer APIs that other companies build products on top of
What They Bring That Crypto Engineers Often Don't:
Production-grade reliability standards. They think about failure modes, rollback procedures, and incident response before writing code. They ship with proper observability, comprehensive testing, and deployment processes that catch issues before production. They don't ship and iterate toward stability—they ship stable.
Integration expertise that scales. They know the difference between "we shipped an integration" and "we built integration infrastructure that handles edge cases, maintains backward compatibility, and scales to thousands of partners." They've designed APIs that financial institutions actually want to integrate with.
Compliance-first architecture. Security and compliance aren't bolted on later. They've designed systems where KYC/AML, transaction monitoring, and audit trails are fundamental from day one. Like Tempo's compliance hooks at the protocol level—built for regulatory requirements from the start.
User-centric product thinking. They've built financial products for people who don't know what a blockchain is. When competing with Cash App and Venmo for mainstream adoption, "crypto UX" isn't good enough.
This isn't one-way. They bring critical infrastructure expertise but need to understand crypto-native patterns.
Decentralized architecture patterns. They're used to systems where you control the database and can fix mistakes. Blockchain's immutability requires fundamentally different thinking—"just update the database" isn't an option.
Smart contract integration. Traditional APIs assume you control the service. Smart contracts require understanding gas optimization, handling failed transactions, and building on infrastructure you don't control.
Different security models. Their model is authentication tokens and access control. Crypto's model is private keys and irreversible operations. Both matter, but failure modes are completely different.
The best hires get genuinely excited about these problems. They see blockchain enabling new products, not as inferior infrastructure.
Understanding what fintech engineers bring and need to learn is only half the equation. The real question is how you structure your team so both perspectives actually work together.
Don't hire only fintech engineers or create separate "crypto team" and "fintech team" silos with handoffs.
The magic is in the mix. Crypto-native engineers understand blockchain architecture and what makes decentralized systems valuable. Fintech engineers bring experience shipping at scale with compliance-first thinking.
The winning pattern: Small teams where both perspectives directly influence every technical decision. Your smart contract engineer and payments infrastructure engineer argue about system design together. The person who scaled Revolut's transaction processing learns from the person who designed your protocol's security model.
You need translators who've worked in both contexts and prevent the two cultures from talking past each other. These people are your most valuable hires.
The engineering culture is different. Understanding these differences prevents friction that kills velocity.
Expect more structured engineering practices. Fintech engineers expect rigorous code reviews, comprehensive testing, and staged rollouts. This isn't bureaucracy—it's learned behavior from environments where bugs cause financial losses. They'll push back on shipping without test coverage, ask about rollback procedures before deploying, want monitoring before code hits production. This keeps systems reliable at scale.
Don't mistake production discipline for "not scrappy enough." The best fintech engineers move fast—they've just learned which corners you can cut and which you cannot.
Security and compliance come as default. They ask about compliance early in design, not as an afterthought. KYC processes, sanctions screening, data retention, regulatory reporting. Building these after you have users is exponentially more expensive than building them correctly from the start.
In crypto, security often means "can the contract be exploited." In fintech, it also means audit trails, regulatory compliance, and anti-money laundering controls.
Different production standards matter. They won't ship code that works on their laptop without understanding behavior under load. They won't deploy database migrations without rollback plans. They won't change payment logic without extensive testing. This discipline allows fintech products to scale from thousands to millions of users without constant production incidents.
Not all financial institution experience is valuable. Be wary of engineers from large, traditional banks.
Why large financial institutions are different:
Engineers from major banks often bring legacy tech mindsets that slow you down:
Speed and decision-making: They're used to committees, approval processes, and quarters-long deployment cycles. Moving from "6-month release cycles" to "ship multiple times per week" requires complete mental model shifts many struggle with.
Technology choices: Large banks run on mainframes, COBOL, and decades-old core banking systems. Understanding how these work has value. Being unable to build without that full enterprise stack kills your velocity.
Over-engineering everything: Enterprise architects build for every possible future scenario. This creates systems that take 18 months to ship and solve problems you don't have yet. You need people who build for the problem in front of you, then refactor as you scale.
What you actually want:
Engineers who understand how traditional financial systems work but aren't constrained by how those institutions build. People from scale-stage fintechs or modern financial infrastructure companies who've seen both worlds—they know the regulations and integration points that matter without the legacy baggage.
Look for people who've built modern fintech products that integrated with traditional banking rails. They understand the constraints without being limited by them.
Blockchain developer starting salaries are 87% higher than web developers, but fintech engineers are used to fintech compensation bands—competitive salaries, meaningful equity, and usually more stability than early-stage crypto.
You're competing with traditional fintech companies offering stability AND crypto companies offering upside. Your value proposition needs to be clear: why should someone with options choose your specific problem?
The best positioning isn't "we're doing cool crypto stuff." It's "we're building infrastructure that will process trillions in value, and you'll architect systems that define how mainstream finance works for the next decade."
Focus your search:
Neobanks that scaled to millions of users (Revolut, Chime, Nubank)
Payment processors and infrastructure companies (Stripe, Adyen, Square)
Scale-stage fintechs that shipped compliant products fast
Modern financial infrastructure companies, not legacy banks
Emphasize in your positioning:
Specific technical problems they'll solve at unprecedented scale
Direct impact on how billions of people interact with money
Working with a small, talent-dense team during the most critical technical decisions
The chance to define standards for an entire industry
Red flags to watch for:
Engineers who view crypto as "fintech with extra steps" rather than genuinely excited about the paradigm shift
People who can't operate without the full enterprise tooling stack they're used to
Those who need six months of process review before shipping anything
Anyone who thinks blockchain is just a less efficient database
Tempo isn't the end of this trend—it's the starting gun. Stripe, Paradigm, Visa, and Deutsche Bank just signaled that institutional adoption requires engineers who've actually built institutional-grade financial products. If you're not already thinking about this hire, you're behind.
Crypto infrastructure teams pursuing institutional scale need engineers who've shipped financial products serving millions of users, not just protocol developers. The magic happens when crypto-native engineers who understand decentralization work alongside fintech engineers who understand compliance, reliability, and traditional finance integration.
But avoid the legacy tech trap. Engineers from scale-stage fintechs and modern payment processors bring the right balance—they understand financial systems without the enterprise baggage that kills velocity.
In six months, every crypto infrastructure company will be competing for this same talent. The compensation will inflate. The pitches will get more sophisticated. The hiring bar will get higher.
The teams that move now—while this playbook isn't obvious to everyone—will build the talent-dense organizations that define how the next generation of financial infrastructure actually works.
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