How fintech companies are solving the engineering talent shortage

Every fintech founder or CTO will tell you the same thing: finding good engineers is hard, and keeping them is harder. You don't close it by adjusting salaries.

We talked to three fintech leaders who've tackled the fintech software talent shortage from different angles.

Why the shortage isn't going away

ManpowerGroup's 2026 Talent Shortage Survey, which polled roughly 39,000 employers across 41 countries, found that 72% now struggle to fill open roles, with AI development and engineering skills topping the list of hardest-to-find capabilities. 

Fintech, sitting right at the overlap of those two skill sets, feels that squeeze more than most industries.

Add a wave of new regulation-driven products, and demand for engineers who can move fast without breaking compliance keeps climbing faster than the supply of qualified candidates.

This isn't unique to one area of fintech. 

Whether it's a payments company scaling in a fast-growing market or a startup competing with better-funded rivals for the same senior hires, the underlying problem is the same.

There simply aren't enough experienced fintech engineers to go around, and every company is trying to hire from the same shortlist.

This IT skills gap in fintech isn't limited to one specialty. It spans backend engineers, compliance-aware developers, and everyone in between, which is why fintech engineering outsourcing has become as common a response as direct hiring.

That scarcity forces companies to compete on more than salary.

When candidates have multiple offers on the table, what tips the decision is usually the story a company can tell about why the work matters and where the career goes from here.

Three proven tech talent shortage solutions shaped by company size and stage.

Build a strategy, not just a hiring plan

Ziad Hilabi, Head of Engineering and R&D at Digital Pay, has spent over a decade in fintech. He saw the competition for engineering talent intensify as more companies entered the market.

His approach: you can't out-recruit the market on salary. Instead, build a reason people stay.

He combines purpose with two things:

• A structured career path so people see how they'll grow,

• A culture of ownership and trust that protects work-life balance.

This shows retention and hiring are intertwined. A strong internal culture is itself a recruiting tool, because engineers talk to other engineers.

Match hiring to your company's stage

Huss El-Sheikh, co-founder and CTO of 9fin, offers a different lens on hiring fintech engineers at an early-stage company.

For early-stage companies, the biggest mistake is using a mature hiring process too early.

El-Sheikh breaks startup growth into three stages:

• Stage one. The company is unknown, so a simple job post attracts self-selected candidates. 9fin's first intern found them through their homepage chat before launch.

• Stage two. The product needs to become self-sustaining, so hiring becomes more deliberate.

• Stage three. The business is growing, so formal hiring practices and talent teams make sense.

This applies beyond one startup.

A hiring process copied from a bigger, later-stage company will waste time and money if applied too early. And a company that never grows out of its earliest, informal hiring habits will struggle to scale.

Test for real skills, not resumes

Once candidates are in the pipeline, El-Sheikh's team uses practical exercises instead of credentials alone.

The goal is to see how they reason about a system, from data storage through serving layers.

In a market hiring for the same job titles, practical signals are more reliable than CV lines.

Go distributed, without losing culture

Alex Rupin, Chief Product Officer at InvestEngine, takes a different approach: look beyond your immediate market for the skills you need.

This mirrors a broader trend of nearshoring fintech software engineers to close skill gaps without the overhead of building an entirely new office, and it reflects a wider shift toward fintech engineering outsourcing as a long-term strategy rather than a stopgap. Many companies formalize this through staff augmentation fintech providers, treating external engineers as an extension of the core team rather than a temporary fix.

Crucially, Rupin doesn't treat this as purely a cost play.

He checks every hire against the company's values: transparency, collaboration, and comfort in small, cross-functional teams.

Distributed hiring solves the supply problem, but only if culture fit is deliberately protected.

The common thread

Three leaders, three stages, three tactics:

• Purpose-driven retention.

• Stage-appropriate hiring.

• Distributed talent sourcing.

What ties them together is that none treat hiring as a one-time problem. It's an ongoing practice that evolves with the company and receives the same scrutiny as any business function.

The original conversations are here:

• The interview with Ziad Hilabi, Head of Engineering and R&D, Digital Pay.

• The interview with Huss El-Sheikh, Co-founder and CTO, 9fin.

• The interview with Alex Rupin, Chief Product Officer, InvestEngine.

And if you struggle with hiring engineers experienced in fintech in–house, let us know.

The Software House was able to fill the talent and knowledge gap in weeks to help one fintech company acquire 150+ business clients through a streamlined digital application process that replaced the traditional 2-3 month wait.