How to get a job in fintech

• Fintechs might seem to exist at the intersection of finance and technology, but they’re more like technology companies that operate in finance.
• Fintechs are startups first and foremost. Expect lean teams and long hours.
• Remote options are available, but hybrid work and other employee benefits are under threat.
• Working for a fintech can be very lucrative, especially if you’re given stock and are subsequently given a chance to sell it for a far higher price

What is fintech?

So you want a job in a fintech startup? Perhaps you’re a computer science student looking at alternative career paths, perhaps a finance student in search of something more innovative than banking. No matter who you are, there are things you need to know before you apply.

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An understanding of the broad fintech ecosystem, and indeed what ‘fintech’ actually is, is essential to understanding where your employer of choice operates within it. As the name implies, fintech is a combination of finance and technology. Put simply, fintechs sell proprietary technology solutions, either to companies (B2B fintechs) or to consumers (B2C fintechs), or some combination of both. Most major fintechs operate in the payments space, but there’s also digital banks, and infrastructure firms for sectors like trading and crypto. 

Fintech is not exempt from the shiny new toy that is AI either; many are working on AI products to automate tasks across financial services. VCs have suggested that implementing AI into your product suite is now somewhat compulsory in fintech.

The industry can be quite complex. Some fintechs rely on other fintechs’ technology to power their own. Some sell their solutions to multinationals like banks with demanding regulatory requirements. These banks sometimes have their own ‘pseudo-fintechs’ like JPMorgan’s ‘Chase’ digibank. The sector is one big interconnected web, for better and for worse.

If your previous experience is more corporate, beware that fintech is a whole different world. Most firms are startups, which means lean teams full of generalists and a very different kind of culture. Startups live from one funding round to the next; if you don’t join one in a healthy state, your fintech career could be DOA.

What’s the state of the fintech industry?

The fintech world is showing signs of revival since the dearth of funding in 2023 and 2024. Funding is easier to come by and lofty company valuations are back. The talk of IPOs has also become more prevalent (although the biggest linked names are still yet to do so). Some fintechs are using the extra cash to hire, some aren’t.

The biggest development, however, is the quiet death of many employee benefits that were once used to tempt people into joining fintech in the first place. Chief among these is the clawback on hybrid working. Fintechs like Starling Bank, Marshmallow and Grab have all been making staff spend more time in the office. There are exceptions; companies like Revolut are remote first, but remote jobs don’t guarantee a good work-life balance. 

Other benefits are also eroding. Payments fintech bolt, for example, used to offer a four-day work week, but quietly scrapped it. On top of this, at startups successfully raising funds like Marshmallow and Ramp, working overtime is allegedly the norm, with people at the latter allegedly working 70-hour weeks after working closer to 40 in previous years.

The great scare of working in fintech in recent years has been the looming threat of layoffs. These haven’t gone away, but are much less common than in recent years. AI will play a major role in future hiring and firing decisions; Klarna, for example, reduced its headcount (through attrition) by using AI to do the work of 700 people, but has since about-turned and is hiring again. The industry can change at any moment so stay vigilant.

Who are the big players?

The three top locations for fintech unicorns (startups valued above $1bn), are New York, London and San Francisco. Each is home to a number of the most prominent fintechs operating today. Each have too many to count, but one of London’s most prominent fintechs is Revolut. New York has Ramp and San Francisco has Chime.

Many of the biggest fintechs come from outside the major hubs. Stripe, arguably the face of fintech, has its headquarters in Ireland. NuBank, one of the largest digibanks, is based in Brazil. Grab is Asia’s biggest fintech and is based in Singapore.

There are also a number of older, more established firms that aren’t always considered among the fintech ecosystem. They include the likes of Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and, for eCommerce, eBay.

Major financial institutions have psuedo-fintechs as they pursue a number of side projects and products with a technological edge. JPMorgan and Nomura, for example, have been working on crypto infrastructure under the respective banners of Kinexys and Laser Digital. Digibanks and payments platforms have been the main outlet, with mixed success; HSBC launched digibank Zing last year as a Revolut competitor, and announced it was shutting it down just one year later.

What do fintech jobs involve?

Fintech jobs are fundamentally different to jobs in traditional finance, especially in a startup. While broader job titles are the same, more will usually be expected of you. The lower your headcount is, the broader your array of tasks will be. 

Software engineers and product managers (PMs) in fintechs work on building and maintaining the infrastructure of the firm, as well as developing new products for it to begin selling. Sales, marketing and partnerships people look for institutions and clients to utilize their services, help broaden consumer awareness of the fintech and, of course, bring in the money.

If you actually found a fintech yourself, you’ll obviously be in an executive role far earlier than you would in traditional finance. While the size of your team may not exceed that of one run by a banking MD (or even some VPs), your responsibilities will be much broader and could include liasing with venture capitalists , private equity firms and other possible investors in the company. 

There are some duties required of all roles in a fintech. The most significant joint effort is making the company appear attractive to investors. “It’s not just sales,” says Adizah Tejani, a fintech portfolio manager of HSBC’s venture capital arm, “it’s everyone’s job to be an advocate for the company.”

Fintech departments also intermingle far more frequently than in banks. Engineers and product managers, for example, may work together much more often and may be structurally intertwined.

The chain of seniority can also be far more ambiguous in a fintech. At Revolut, for example, young employees are handed senior leadership roles and allowed to bring their ideas to fruition far quicker than would be possible elsewhere.

How to get a fintech job.

To survive in fintech today, you’ll need to show you can do more with less. Fintech employees have frequently lamented that their firms have been making cuts, either to headcount or to their cost-base, while expecting a similar level of output. 

The hiring process has become increasingly drawn out, as firms have developed a ‘perfection complex’ that stops them from hiring suitable candidates. In extreme cases, Nadia Edwards-Dashti of fintech recruitment firm Harrington Starr said that fintechs will interview candidates up to 17 times without pulling the trigger.

How do you overcome this struggle? By demonstrating a ‘fintech mindset.’ For Michael Abdul, a London-based fintech recruiter at recruitment firm Volition, this means evidence of “building viable products, prototypes and proof of concepts; you should be trying to innovate.” Louisa Süsserott, head of talent advisory at VC firm Cherry Ventures, says fintech employees must be “highly adaptive” with “great communication skills” and, interestingly, should be “very happy in ambiguous environments.”

Experience in a big name company also helps, but it can be role dependent. Abdul says that “Goldman Sachs are always building innovative stuff,” but they also are plagued with legacy tech; fintechs can usually tell which side you’re working on.

The supposed gold standard for high-performing fintech employees are those at Revolut. CEO Nik Storonsky said he is looking for “self-guided” people who don’t need to be asked how they’re doing because they find fulfilment in their work. Some fintechs are a bit nicer.

When it comes to education, university brand is key. “I put a lot of value on someone who’s gone to a Russell Group in computer science over someone else,” Abdul says. For US fintech jobs, think Ivy League or a major institute of technology.

As for your personal life, Abdul says, “Companies heavily love people that love tech, that do side projects and are passionate about it.” They also love “hackathons and competitions; if I’m sending a CV over, and they have an active GitHub, I will include it.” This won’t just help you for engineering jobs. Abdul says sales staff are in high demand right now, but firms are looking for candidates with technical knowledge who really understand the product they’re selling. Some fintechs also offer student schemes, like Revolut’s ‘Rev-Celerator’ internships and Supernova from OKX in Hong Kong and Singapore. The application process for the latter was “stupid hard” last year, according to applicants. 

Fintechs with university recruitment teams include:

Fintechs with Graduate programs include:

Fintechs in general are shifting toward more mature teams, so there’s not too many graduate opportunities, but a role that has seen increased demand is the ‘founder’s associate’. This is essentially an executive assistant on steroids; one founder’s associate told us the role would fluctuate between travelling to Nigeria to meet with banking clients and babysitting the founder’s children. 

Beyond these, you might find entry-level roles hard to come by in fintech, as startups want plug-and-play employees. If you’re autonomous and don’t need much training, you could find a good job, otherwise it might be best to ply your trade in banking or tech for a few years before making a transition.

What qualifications do you need for a job in fintech?

Fintech encompasses such a wide range of roles that your choice of course is largely dependent on the function you hope to work in. Software engineers should probably do computer science, finance staff should study finance or accounting. You get the gist.

But fintech, more than most sectors of finance, is often looking for generalists, people who can do a little bit of everything. It’s hard to do that without wider business knowledge of the fintech ecosystem.

Luckily, there are a variety of courses, that we’ve looked at here. Oxford and Harvard both do paid programs, while MIT and Copenhagen Business School offer free educational resources. These are often used by employees in TradFi looking to transition into fintech, but it wouldn’t hurt to get a lay of the land even earlier in your career.

How much do fintech jobs pay? 

Depending on where you work, fintechs can be a gold mine. The biggest fintechs vary massively in pay, and smaller ones have just as much variety. We previously looked at pay for engineers at 36 major fintechs; 12 paid over $300k on average, while 7 paid $110k or less.

Stripe has been well regarded as the top payer for fintech historically, but has been losing its edge. Reports from Levels.fyi suggest that its top engineers were paid $940k on average in 2023, but that pay fell to less than $728k in 2024. The top paying fintech on average that we saw in 2024 was Plaid, which paid $400k on average.

The USP of fintech pay is stock payments, usually in the form of restricted stock units (RSUs). $80k of Stripe’s entry level engineer pay consists of RSUs, according to Levels, and it only gets larger as seniority grows. Owning stock seems a big positive, an opportunity to grow your income as the company grows, but as previously mentioned, IPOs are an increasingly rare occurrence. 

Making millions from fintech stock usually requires joining a startup very early, however. Joining a fintech at its series A funding stage or seed funding stage maximizes your earnings potential, but these can be some of the most chaotic places to work in fintech, with no guarantees of success.

Fintech pay is sometimes great, sometimes bad, often decent. Do your due diligence on each firm you are interested in working at and ask yourself if the culture makes up for the pay, or vice versa. Good luck.

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