The Guest – Kevin Holditch, VP of Engineering at Form3
Kevin Holditch is the VP of Engineering at Form3, a leading provider of payment infrastructure powering real-time, secure transactions for banks and fintech companies worldwide. In this episode, Kevin shares his journey from founding engineer to senior leadership, reflecting on the challenges of transitioning from hands-on coding to enabling teams and departments to succeed.
We discuss Form3’s cloud-native payment infrastructure, the balance between innovation and regulatory demands, and their deliberate approach to hiring top-tier talent globally, even pre-COVID. Kevin highlights the company’s engineering achievements, including a multi-cloud platform capable of processing payments seamlessly across AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, and offers insights into scaling remote teams, nurturing internal leadership, and maintaining job satisfaction.
Some highlights of this episode include:
- Transition from Engineer to Leader
- Building a Multi-Cloud Active-Active-Active Payment Platform
- Hiring Philosophy & Talent Strategy
- Operating in a Regulated Financial Environment While Staying Innovative
- Impact and Caution Around AI in Software Development
Q: How do you satisfy the career ambitions of highly talented people, especially when it comes to leadership opportunities?
I think there are a few parts to it. One is job satisfaction – keeping people engaged by giving them interesting challenges and problems to solve. At Form 3, we’ve been able to do that consistently, so people are constantly stretched and learning.
The other part is having a clear career structure that allows people to progress within the company. One thing I really value is that, apart from senior engineer roles, we don’t hire into engineering leadership positions from outside. Everyone above senior engineer—team leads, heads of engineering, VPs of engineering—has been promoted from within. That might be partly due to how we’ve grown as a company, and I’m not saying it’s the only right approach. But what we’ve found is that this creates leaders who have spent at least a year, often two or three, as senior engineers here. They’ve written a lot of the code, know how the services work, and understand the platform inside out. Even if they’ve stepped away from day-to-day coding, they still have a deep understanding of how everything fits together, which makes them more effective leaders.
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