Founding Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Role Overview:

We are looking for a Founding CTO to become the companys first technology leader and a core partner to the founder in shaping the future of the business. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who can build the next generation of the product, establish the engineering culture, and create a scalable, secure technology foundation from the ground up.

In the early stage, you will be deeply involved in architecture, coding, delivery, and technical decision-making. As the company grows, you will evolve the engineering organization, platform capabilities, and long-term technology strategy.

What Youll Own:

Platform Architecture & Engineering:

- Design and build the core platform architecture across e-invoicing, payments, identity, reconciliation, and integrations with banks, ASPs, and hotel/travel systems.

- Establish scalable, secure, and maintainable engineering foundations for future product growth.

Engineering Team & Culture:

- Recruit, structure, and grow the engineering team.

- Define engineering standards, levelling, ownership expectations, and a culture of quality and accountability.

Reliability, Security & Compliance:

- Ensure production reliability and security for systems handling payments, tax-critical data, and enterprise customer information.

- Build security, observability, testing, and operational discipline into the platform from day one.

Delivery Velocity & Product Quality:

- Drive fast execution while maintaining high quality through CI/CD, automated testing, code reviews, security gates, and monitoring.

- Balance speed, reliability, scalability, and commercial priorities in every technical decision.

Technical Strategy & Founder Partnership:

- Partner closely with the founder on company direction, customer conversations, investor discussions, and the technical narrative of the business.

- Translate technical trade-offs clearly for business, product, and engineering stakeholders.

Your First Challenge:

Within the first 90 days, the expectation is to deliver a production-ready v1.0 of the UAE Finance Operating System, including:

- E-invoicing orchestration

- Payment workflows

- Bank and ASP integrations

- Reconciliation capabilities

- A handover-ready engineering foundation

The goal is not a prototype, but a trustworthy platform customers can rely on.

Who You Are:

- 10+ years of engineering experience, with recent leadership in high-stakes fintech, payments, banking, ERP, e-commerce, or compliance-heavy systems.

- A player-coach who has owned production systems end-to-end and still reviews or contributes to production code when needed.

- Experienced in recruiting, mentoring, and building strong engineering teams.

- Proven track record of shipping production-scale systems on AWS or equivalent cloud platforms.

- Comfortable with ambiguity, founder-level urgency, and making decisions with incomplete information.

- Skilled at balancing architecture, delivery, hiring, QA, security, and long-term maintainability.

Technical Experience Were Looking For:

Languages & Runtimes:

- Go and/or Python at production scale.

- JavaScript/TypeScript familiarity for adjacent work.

Cloud & Infrastructure:

- AWS in production, including ECS/Fargate, Aurora PostgreSQL, SQS, Lambda, KMS, IAM, CloudWatch, and S3.

- Infrastructure as code with Terraform or CloudFormation.

- Experience with cloud cost modelling and capacity planning.

Data & Storage:

- PostgreSQL at depth, including schema design, query performance, and transactions.

- Redis for caching and queues.

- Event stores, message queues, and distributed data patterns.

- Familiarity with MongoDB or other NoSQL databases is a plus.

Architecture:

- Event-driven systems, API-first design, integration architecture, distributed systems, microservices, and modular monoliths.

- Idempotency, retries, audit trails, and eventual consistency.

Domain Technology (Preferred):

- Payments systems, virtual card/VAN orchestration, settlement and reconciliation.

- E-invoicing standards such as Peppol and UBL.

- ERP/accounting integrations, identity/KYC flows, tax-tech, or comparable money-movement systems.

Engineering Practices:

- CI/CD, DevSecOps, automated testing, code review, observability, monitoring, secret management, and dependency/container scanning.

- Experience embedding these practices into the engineering culture from the beginning.

AI-Native Engineering:

We expect the technology leader to leverage AI responsibly to create engineering leverage. Practical experience with tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Sonar, Semgrep, Playwright, and modern CI/CD workflows is highly valued.

The goal is not simply writing more code, but accelerating development, testing, documentation, code review, and operations while maintaining quality and security.

Building the Next Engineering Team:

A major responsibility of this role is identifying, recruiting, mentoring, and retaining top engineering talent. The Founding CTO will build a culture of ownership, quality, speed, and continuous improvement.