CTO — Fintech Prop Trading & CFD Brokerage Platform

Emerald Zebra - Recruitment & Executive Search; Dubai; On-site; AED 900,000 - 1,300,000; Full time

Job summary

Emerald Zebra on behalf of our client, a global fintech group, seeks a Chief Technology Officer based in Dubai, UAE or Malaysia to own engineering and platform strategy across prop trading and brokerage operations.

You will drive reliability, security, and scalability, partner with the CPO on what to build, and shape the technical culture across multiple countries to support long-term growth.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of technology leadership experience in fintech, brokerage or trading platforms.
• Deep understanding of CFD and/or prop trading infrastructure and related integrations.
• Proven experience scaling engineering organisations across multiple distributed hubs.
• Strong grounding in cloud-native architecture, distributed systems, real-time data infrastructure.
• Experience embedding compliance, data governance and security controls into engineering workflows in regulated financial services environments.
• Vendor management capability with build-vs-buy decision frameworks and cost optimisation.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute the group's long-term technology strategy and architectural roadmap for trading and brokerage operations.
• Oversee platform reliability, latency, observability and incident response across trading environments.
• Architect shared services, data pipelines and foundational platform components for multi-asset expansion.
• Lead the engineering operating model with squad-based delivery, OKRs and continuous improvement rituals.
• Ensure regulatory readiness, risk controls, data privacy and DFSA licensing requirements.
• Drive AI-native engineering initiatives and scalable data/ML infrastructure, with a focus on reducing toil and enabling informed decision-making.

Skills

Technology leadership

Fintech/trading platforms

Cloud-native architecture

SLOs and observability

Security and compliance

Vendor management

People leadership

Tools

MetaTrader integrations

Data infrastructure

Job description

Emerald Zebra on behalf of our client, a global fintech group, seeks a Chief Technology Officer based in Dubai, UAE or Malaysia to own engineering and platform strategy across prop trading and brokerage operations.

You will drive reliability, security, and scalability, partner with the CPO on what to build, and shape the technical culture across multiple countries to support long-term growth.