Chief Technology Officer

Black Pen Recruitment; Dubai; On-site; AED 900,000 - 1,500,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Visa sponsorship

Flights covered

Health insurance included

Spouse and children sponsorship

Job summary

Black Pen Recruitment supports a Dubai-based fintech client seeking a Chief Technology Officer to own technology vision, architecture, security, and execution across high-transaction platforms. You will lead an engineering organization, govern external partners, and ensure regulatory readiness to scale across Africa and emerging markets.

The role emphasizes delivering reliable, compliant, and scalable technology, guiding platform evolution, data analytics, and incident readiness, while

Qualifications

• 10-15 years of software engineering experience including 5 years leading teams in high-transaction fintech/payments platforms.
• Strong backend depth in enterprise-grade systems (JVM ecosystems or equivalent).
• API-first design and relational database fundamentals.
• Secure engineering in regulated environments.
• Delivery governance with agile at scale and QA discipline.
• Experience leading external tech partners and vendors with SLAs.
• Cloud platforms, CI/CD pipelines, observability and production operations.
• Excellent communication in English and French.
• Experience operating in Africa or similar emerging markets.

Responsibilities

• Define and communicate multi-year technology strategy aligned with business priorities.
• Establish architectural principles and engineering standards balancing speed and scalability.
• Own platform evolution, security, data analytics capability development.
• Disciplined delivery OS: sprints, governance, QA gates, launch readiness.
• Lead vendor selection, SLAs, and partner accountability.
• Govern third-party integrations, API contracts and monitoring.

Skills

Years of leadership experience

Architecture depth

API-first design

Secure engineering

Delivery governance

Vendor management

Cloud platforms

CI/CD pipelines

English and French

Africa market experience

Tools

JVM ecosystems

Relational databases

Job description

Our client is a Dubai-based technology company operating in the fintech sector with an active footprint in Africa through its mobile money and payments operations in Guinea. The organisation is focused on delivering innovative digital financial solutions that enhance accessibility efficiency and financial inclusion across emerging markets.

Role Overview

The CTO owns the companys technology vision architecture security posture and execution standards. This role ensures reliable delivery scalable operations and regulatory readiness across a high transaction fintech platform and a B2B ordering platform.

The CTO builds and leads a strong internal engineering organization governs external technology partners and ensures all technology decisions directly support business growth compliance expectations and long-term platform maintainability.

Job Type: Full Time/Permanent

Reports to: Chief Executive Officer

Platforms: High-transaction fintech/payments platform and B2B ordering/trade platform

Geographic Context: Multi-country emerging markets (Africa exposure preferred)

Requirements

• 1015 years of software engineering experience including 5 years leading teams in high transaction integration-heavy platforms (fintech/payments strongly preferred).
• Strong architecture and backend depth in enterprise-grade systems (JVM-class ecosystems or equivalent).
• Deep understanding of API-first design and relational database fundamentals.
• Practical knowledge of modern authentication/authorization patterns and secure engineering practices in regulated environments.
• Strong delivery governance experience (agile at scale release management QA discipline operational readiness).
• Proven experience leading external tech partners and vendors with measurable SLAs and accountability.
• Working knowledge of cloud platforms CI/CD pipelines observability and production operations (hands-on experience is a plus).
• Excellent communication skills in English and French.
• Experience operating in Africa or similar emerging markets is highly preferred.

Leadership Expectations

• High ownership: Drives outcomes not excuses.
• Strong judgment: Makes pragmatic decisions and manages trade-offs transparently.
• Calm under pressure: Leads incidents and high-stakes decisions with clarity and confidence

Responsibilities

Technology Strategy & Vision

• Define and communicate a clear multi-year technology strategy aligned with business priorities (growth reliability compliance cost discipline).
• Establish architectural principles and engineering standards that balance delivery speed with scalability and long-term maintainability.
• Own technology roadmap inputs including:
• Platform evolution and scalability planning
• Security and compliance maturity roadmap
• Data and analytics capability development

Delivery Governance & Execution Excellence

• Establish and enforce a disciplined delivery operating system: sprint cadence release governance QA gates documentation standards and launch readiness.
• Ensure consistent predictable delivery through strong prioritization dependency management and proactive risk mitigation.
• Drive cross-functional execution alignment across Product Operations Commercial Compliance and Support teams.

Vendor and Technology Partner Leadership

• Lead technology partner selection and provide input into contracting commercials and SLAs.
• Implement and manage vendor scorecards covering delivery quality speed stability responsiveness and SLA adherence.
• Enforce accountability through structured escalation corrective action plans and performance reviews.
• Govern third-party integrations end-to-end including API contracts rollout plans monitoring and settlement readiness where applicable.

Architecture Security and Regulatory Readiness

• Ensure secure-by-design engineering practices across platforms including: o Identity and access management patterns
• Audit trails and logging
• Data protection and secure coding fundamentals
• Vulnerability management and remediation
• Own technical readiness for compliance-driven requirements (e.g. KYC/AML workflows traceability operational controls) in partnership with Compliance and Legal.
• Define and maintain policies for incident response disaster recovery and business continuity.

Reliability Performance and Production Operations

• Own production stability and performance across platforms.
• Define and enforce standards for monitoring alerting incident management and post-incident root cause analysis.
• Ensure capacity planning and performance tuning appropriate for high-transaction environments.
• Build operational runbooks and ensure support teams can resolve day-to-day issues without engineering becoming a bottleneck.

Team Building Leadership and Culture

• Recruit develop and retain high-performing technical talent.
• Build leadership layers including engineering managers technical leads and platform owners.
• Create a culture of accountability measurable outcomes documentation and quality.
• Coach leaders on delivery management performance management and professional stakeholder communication.

Budgeting & Technology Financial Discipline

• Own technology budgets including infrastructure costs vendor spend and build-vs-buy decisions.
• Maintain strong cost governance without compromising reliability security or compliance.
• Provide transparent reporting to CEO and Board on:
• Technology spend
• Delivery health
• Key risks and technical debt

Success Metrics (1218 Months)

Delivery & Execution

• Roadmap milestone hit rate and release predictability.
• Reduction in slipped or de-scoped releases.

Platform Stability & Reliability

• Uptime and availability against targets.
• Incident frequency MTTR and repeat incident rate.

Quality

• Production defect rate and defect leakage.
• Regression frequency and overall quality maturity.

Security & Compliance

• Audit outcomes and regulatory findings.
• Time to close critical vulnerabilities.
• Security incident frequency and severity.

Vendor Performance

• SLA adherence.
• Delivery quality scores.
• Escalation resolution time.

Team & Leadership

• Hiring plan achievement.
• Attrition control.
• Strength and depth of leadership bench.

Benefits

• Visa sponsorship
• Flights covered
• Spouse and children sponsorship included
• Health insurance included
• Additional benefits are company specific and open to discussion