A career that already speaks our language
Zakarya has spent more than ten years building systems where money, data and reliability meet. Few engineers have worked on both sides of what DFNS does: the core banking systems that keep a financial institution’s books, and the modern platforms that move value at scale. Zakarya has done both.
Most recently, at Majority, a Swedish-founded fintech based in Miami and Stockholm, he ran Core Banking and Payments engineering. He led ten backend engineers across Stockholm and Miami, responsible for core banking, card issuing and risk. Under his leadership, the transaction platform grew significantly in volume while maintaining high availability and low latency. He improved the payment success rate by routing payments intelligently across several processors and tuning risk rules. He also designed a double-entry ledger and a multi-bank core banking system that became the company’s system of record, reducing operating costs significantly. All of this ran under PCI and SOC 2 requirements.
Before and after Majority, Zakarya worked at Thales in Singapore. As technical lead for data and machine learning, he delivered anomaly detection across more than 100 terabytes of data for SMRT, one of Singapore’s main public transport operators, and built a secure data lake that grew to petabytes across four business units. He later returned to lead AI implementation, managing 15 engineers across Paris and Singapore while staying largely hands-on. In six months, he architected four production generative AI products, including a SOC 2 compliance platform. He also built an agentic system on Amazon Bedrock that generates PCI DSS-mapped infrastructure code, cutting its cost by 41% and its run time by 72%.
His career began at Accenture in Paris, building software and machine learning products for clients such as Orange, La Banque Postale, EDF and Aéroports de Paris. That is also where he learned to explain complex systems to executives, a skill he has used ever since in technical pre-sales and solution design.
Why it matters here
DFNS is the core banking platform for digital assets. The hardest problems we solve are the ones Zakarya has already solved elsewhere. How do you keep a ledger that an auditor will accept as the record of truth? How do you route payments so they succeed more often? How do you scale transaction volume without losing reliability, while staying inside PCI and SOC 2? He has answered those questions in production, for real customers, at real volume.
He also brings something we value just as much: a strong grasp of how AI can change the way financial infrastructure is built and operated. He has led the adoption of agentic tooling across a large engineering organization and set standards for evaluating and using AI responsibly. That experience will shape how we build at DFNS.
And he knows the region. Singapore is home to some of our most important clients, including regulated stablecoin issuers and financial institutions moving onchain. Having a senior engineer there who can work alongside them, in their time zone and in their context, makes a real difference.
What Zakarya will work on
As our first Principal Software Engineer in APAC, Zakarya will work across our core platform and with clients in the region. He will help institutions design and deploy their architecture on DFNS, from accounts and ledgers to payments and controls, and bring what he learns back into the product. He will also help us build the engineering team in Singapore as DFNS grows in Asia.
Zakarya holds an Advanced Master in Data Science and Machine Learning from ENSAE Paris and studied Computer and Information Sciences at the École des Mines de Nancy.
Join us
We’re growing in Singapore, across APAC and everywhere we operate. If you want to build the core banking platform for digital assets with people like Zakarya, take a look at our open roles.
See our open positions: jobs.deel.com/dfns
