Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Gole Cloud provides IaaS / PaaS / managed private and hybrid cloud / backup and disaster recovery / colocation services to enterprise, public sector, and financial services clients across South Africa and the SADC region. Clients choose a local provider for data sovereignty, POPIA compliance, low latency, and responsive support, while competing offerings from global hyperscalers now operate in-country regions.

The CTO will position Gole Cloud's platform to win on those strengths: sovereign, resilient, and cost-competitive cloud, with credible hybrid and multi-cloud integration with the hyperscalers. The role combines strategic leadership with hands-on technical credibility, and carries executive accountability for uptime, security, and technology spend.

Technology strategy and roadmap

• Define and execute a 3–5 year technology strategy aligned to the Gole Cloud's growth and profitability targets.
• Own the product and platform roadmap with the CPO/Commercial team: compute, storage, networking, backup/DR, containers and Kubernetes, AI/GPU infrastructure, and managed services.
• Shape the hybrid and multi-cloud proposition, including interconnects and partnerships with hyperscalers operating in South Africa.
• Evaluate build, buy, and partner decisions; manage strategic vendor relationships VMware/Broadcom alternatives, H3C, Sangfor, OpenStack, hardware OEMs, network carriers).

Platform, infrastructure, and operations

• Ensure availability, performance, and scalability of the cloud platform against contracted SLAs.
• Oversee data centre, colocation, and network footprint, including capacity planning and expansion.
• Drive automation, infrastructure-as-code, observability, and SRE practices to lower cost-to-serve.
• Own incident, problem, and major-outage management, including executive communication to clients.

Security, risk, and compliance

• Own the information security program and cyber resilience directly.
• Ensure compliance with POPIA, the Cybercrimes Act, ECTA, and, where relevant, ICASA licensing obligations.
• Support clients in regulated sectors, including financial services requirements for outsourcing and cloud (Prudential Authority / FSCA standards), and public sector requirements under the National Data and Cloud Policy.
• Maintain certifications such as ISO/IEC 27001, 27017, 27018, ISO 22301 and PCI DSS where applicable.
• Own business continuity and disaster recovery for internal and client-facing services.

People and organization

• Lead, grow, and retain a high-performing engineering organization in a competitive local skills market.
• Build succession plans, graduate and learnership pipelines, and skills development aligned to B-BBEE and Employment Equity targets.
• Foster a culture of ownership, engineering excellence, and customer focus.

Commercial and executive leadership

• Manage the technology budget (OPEX and CAPEX) and improve unit economics and gross margin per service.
• Act as senior technical voice with key clients, partners, and investors; support large bids and tenders.
• Report to the CEO on technology performance, risk, and investment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Systems, Engineering, or related field (NQF 7). Honours or Master's preferred.
• MBA or equivalent business qualification advantageous.
• Relevant certifications advantageous: cloud architecture (AWS, Azure, GCP), TOGAF, CISSP/CISM, ITIL.

Experience

• 15+ years in technology, with at least 5 years in a senior leadership role (Head of Technology, VP, or CTO).
• Proven experience running cloud, hosting, data centre, or telecoms infrastructure at scale with contractual SLAs.
• Track record of leading teams of 50+ engineers, including through multiple management layers.
• Experience managing multi-million-rand budgets and delivering measurable margin or cost improvements.
• Experience selling to and supporting enterprise, financial services, or public sector clients in South Africa.

Technical knowledge

• Virtualization and private cloud platforms (H3C, Sangfor, VMware, OpenStack, Nutanix, Proxmox or similar) and migration strategies.
• Containers and orchestration (Kubernetes), DevOps, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible).
• Storage (block, object, file), backup and DR technologies, and networking (SDN, BGP, peering, interconnects).
• Hyperscaler services and hybrid/multi-cloud architectures.
• Security architecture, zero trust, identity, and SOC operations.
• Emerging areas: GPU/AI infrastructure, sovereign cloud, FinOps.

South African context

• Working knowledge of POPIA, the Cybercrimes Act, ECTA, and data sovereignty requirements.
• Understanding of sector regulation affecting clients (Prudential Authority, FSCA, SITA and public sector procurement).
• Familiarity with B-BBEE, Employment Equity, and local skills development frameworks.
• Experience managing operations through load-shedding and grid instability.

Leadership competencies and attributes

• Strategic thinking: connects technology choices to market position, pricing, and margin.
• Technical credibility: respected by engineers; can challenge architecture and vendor claims in depth.
• Operational discipline: calm, decisive leadership during outages and security incidents.
• Commercial acumen: understands cost-to-serve, capacity economics, and contract risk.
• People leadership: builds diverse teams, develops talent, and retains scarce skills.
• Stakeholder influence: communicates clearly with the CEO, Board, clients, regulators, and partners.
• Integrity and accountability: owns outcomes and upholds governance in line with King IV principles.