Chief Technology Officer

The CTO will be responsible for designing and building secure, scalable, reliable, and cost-efficient technology systems that support the company's current operations and future business expansion. This is a hands-on technology leadership role requiring a combination of strategic planning, software development expertise, infrastructure management, system architecture, cybersecurity, and end-to-end ownership of the software development lifecycle.

The ideal candidate should be capable of architecting systems, reviewing and writing code when required, managing cloud infrastructure, leading engineering teams, and ensuring that technology remains a strong foundation for business growth.

The candidate will have responsibilities across the following functions:

Technology Strategy and Leadership:

• Define and execute the company's overall technology roadmap in alignment with business objectives.
• Design a scalable technology architecture to support financial products, business operations, customer platforms, internal systems, and future digital initiatives.
• Evaluate technology choices, frameworks, platforms, and infrastructure based on scalability, security, maintainability, performance, and cost.
• Establish engineering standards, technical governance, coding practices, and documentation processes.
• Build and lead a high-performing technology team, including developers, DevOps engineers, QA professionals, and infrastructure specialists.
• Work closely with senior management, product, operations, finance, and compliance teams to translate business requirements into effective technical solutions.

Software Architecture and Engineering:

• Design, develop, and maintain secure, scalable, and maintainable software applications and backend systems.
• Define application architecture, service boundaries, API standards, database structures, and integration patterns.
• Lead technical design reviews and make architectural decisions involving monolithic, modular, or microservices-based systems as appropriate.
• Oversee frontend, backend, mobile, API, and database development across business platforms.
• Establish reusable components, coding standards, code review processes, and engineering best practices.
• Identify and resolve technical bottlenecks, performance issues, architectural limitations, and technical debt.
• Ensure systems are designed for availability, reliability, observability, and future growth.

Cloud Architecture and Infrastructure Management:

• Design, implement, and manage secure, scalable, and cost-effective cloud infrastructure.
• Lead cloud architecture, deployment planning, server management, networking, storage, database hosting, and environment configuration.
• Manage cloud infrastructure on platforms such as AWS or equivalent providers, based on business requirements.
• Establish development, testing, staging, and production environments with appropriate access controls and isolation.
• Implement infrastructure monitoring, logging, alerting, automated backups, recovery mechanisms, and capacity planning.
• Manage cloud costs, resource utilisation, performance optimisation, and infrastructure scalability.
• Define infrastructure-as-code practices and automation to improve deployment consistency and operational efficiency.
• Evaluate managed cloud services, containerization, and orchestration technologies where appropriate.

Hands-on Development and Technical Oversight:

• Maintain strong technical involvement in system architecture, complex engineering problems, critical code reviews, and production troubleshooting.
• Review and guide backend services, frontend applications, APIs, database queries, and integration code.
• Write or contribute to production code when required, particularly for critical components, prototypes, integrations, and performance-sensitive systems.
• Establish clean-code principles, secure coding practices, testing standards, and maintainable software design.
• Mentor developers and improve the engineering team's technical capabilities.
• Ensure technical decisions balance delivery speed, quality, security, and long-term maintainability.

DevOps, CI/CD and Software Development Lifecycle:

• Own the complete software development lifecycle, from requirements and architecture through development, testing, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance.
• Implement automated CI/CD pipelines for reliable and repeatable software releases.
• Establish version control, branching strategies, build automation, code quality checks, and release management processes.
• Introduce automated testing, including unit, integration, API, regression, and end-to-end testing.
• Implement appropriate containerization and deployment automation using tools such as Docker and, where justified, Kubernetes.
• Establish rollback strategies, release approvals, environment controls, and production change management.
• Reduce deployment failures, release cycle times, downtime, and manual operational effort.

Database Design and Systems Integration:

• Design and manage robust database architectures, data models, indexing strategies, and query optimisation.
• Work with relational and NoSQL databases based on application and workload requirements.
• Establish data integrity, consistency, backup, archival, retention, and recovery practices.
• Develop and maintain secure APIs and integrations with financial institutions, payment systems, KYC providers, identity services, and other third-party platforms as applicable.
• Design reliable integration patterns, including appropriate retry handling, idempotency, reconciliation, and error recovery.
• Ensure financial transactions and business-critical records are processed accurately, consistently, and traceably.

Cybersecurity, Data Protection and Risk Management:

• Establish a security-first approach across application development, infrastructure, databases, and third-party integrations.
• Implement identity and access management, least-privilege access, multifactor authentication, encryption, secrets management, and secure network controls.
• Oversee vulnerability management, dependency scanning, penetration testing, security assessments, and remediation.
• Define secure coding guidelines and ensure security considerations are incorporated throughout the development lifecycle.
• Establish audit trails, security logging, incident response procedures, and appropriate data access controls.
• Work with compliance, legal, and risk teams to address applicable financial services regulations, cybersecurity requirements, data protection obligations, and audit requirements.
• Maintain appropriate controls for sensitive financial and personal information.

Reliability, Business Continuity and Production Support:

• Establish service availability, performance, reliability, and incident management standards.
• Develop disaster recovery and business continuity plans, including backup validation and recovery testing.
• Define and monitor service-level objectives, recovery time objectives (RTO), and recovery point objectives (RPO).
• Implement application and infrastructure observability through centralised logs, metrics, traces, and alerting.
• Lead resolution of critical production incidents and conduct root-cause analysis to prevent recurrence.
• Establish support processes for production issues, planned maintenance, capacity expansion, and system upgrades.

Financial Services Technology:

• Understand the technology requirements of financial services, including transaction integrity, data accuracy, security, auditability, reconciliation, and operational resilience.
• Design systems with appropriate controls for financial records, transaction processing, reporting, and integrations.
• Support technology development for investment platforms, customer onboarding, partner management, payment workflows, reporting, and other financial operations as required by the business.
• Ensure appropriate separation of duties, access controls, approval workflows, and traceability for sensitive operations.
• Work with business and compliance stakeholders to convert regulatory and operational requirements into technical controls.
• Maintain a clear understanding of applicable technology and cybersecurity obligations for the company's business activities.

Vendor Management and Technology Budget:

• Evaluate and manage cloud providers, software vendors, technology partners, development agencies, and third-party service providers.
• Establish technology budgets and optimise expenditure across cloud infrastructure, software licenses, security tools, and engineering resources.
• Assess vendor security, reliability, scalability, contractual commitments, and operational dependencies.
• Make informed build-versus-buy decisions and prevent unnecessary technical complexity or vendor lock-in.
• Report on technology performance, risks, delivery progress, infrastructure costs, and strategic initiatives to senior management.

Preferred Technical Skills:

The candidate should possess strong engineering fundamentals and practical experience across several of the following areas.

Application development:

• JavaScript and TypeScript.
• MERN stack: MongoDB, Express.js, React.js, and Node.js .
• REST APIs, API integrations, authentication, and authorisation.
• React Native or other mobile application technologies.
• Experience with scalable backend architecture and production application development.

Cloud and infrastructure:

• AWS architecture and administration.
• Compute, networking, storage, managed databases, load balancing, and cloud security.
• Linux server administration and production environment management.
• Docker, containerization, and Kubernetes where appropriate.
• Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, or equivalent tools.
• Cloud cost optimisation, monitoring, backup, and disaster recovery.

DevOps and engineering tools:

• CI/CD using GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins, or equivalent platforms.
• Git, automated testing, code quality, and release management.
• Monitoring and observability tools.
• Application performance optimisation and production troubleshooting.

Databases and data:

• PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, or other suitable databases.
• Database schema design, indexing, query optimisation, and data migration.
• Caching, queues, asynchronous processing, and distributed systems concepts.

Security and reliability:

• Secure application architecture and OWASP principles.
• IAM, encryption, secrets management, vulnerability management, and audit logging.
• High availability, disaster recovery, incident response, and business continuity.

Desired Candidate Profile:

• Bachelor's or master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline.
• 10-15+ years of experience in software engineering, architecture, infrastructure, or technology leadership.
• Demonstrated experience designing, developing, deploying, and maintaining production-grade applications and systems.
• Strong understanding of cloud architecture, server management, software engineering, databases, APIs, and DevOps.
• Experience leading engineering teams while retaining the ability to make hands-on technical contributions.
• Experience managing production systems where security, reliability, data integrity, and availability are critical.
• Familiarity with financial services, fintech, investment platforms, banking, payments, insurance, or other regulated environments.
• Strong problem-solving, communication, leadership, and decision-making skills.
• Ability to operate in a growing business environment and build technology capabilities without unnecessary complexity or expenditure.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):

• System availability, reliability, and production incident frequency.
• Software delivery speed, release quality, and deployment success rate.
• Application performance, scalability, and response times.
• Security posture, vulnerability remediation, and audit readiness.
• Infrastructure cost efficiency and cloud resource utilisation.
• Data integrity, backup success, and disaster recovery readiness.
• Quality of engineering delivery, maintainability, and reduction of technical debt.
• Timely delivery of technology initiatives aligned with business priorities.
• Team productivity, engineering standards, and technology capability development.

Skills

AWS, CI/CD, DevOps, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, architecture, solution architecture, system architecture