Founding CTO

Within your first 90 days, we expect a production-ready v1.0 of the UAE Finance Operating System, including e-invoicing orchestration, integrations, payment workflows, and a handover-ready engineering foundation.

The objective is not a demo. The objective is a platform that customers can trust.

You have a decade or more in engineering, with the most recent years leading or co-leading high-stakes builds in fintech, payments, banking, ERP, e-commerce, or another domain where the system has to be right

You're a player-coach. You've owned production systems end to end, and you still get into the code when the situation calls for it — you haven't moved so far from the work that you can't review a pull request

You've recruited and built a team. You can spot strong engineers, lift the bar, and create the conditions for them to do their best work

You've shipped at production scale on AWS (or equivalent) and have opinions — defensible ones — about when to use what

You're comfortable with ambiguity, founder-level urgency, and making calls before every piece of information has arrived

You think in trade-offs, not absolutes — and you've built the kind of documentation and team depth that lets your work survive after you

You are looking for a pure advisory CTO role.

You have not personally reviewed production code in the last 12 months.

You need a large team before delivering outcomes.

You prefer perfect specifications before execution begins.

You are uncomfortable being accountable for architecture, delivery, hiring, QA, security, and handover.

You are excited by the title more than the opportunity to build.

Depth across most of these, working familiarity across all. We care more about how you reason than which tools you've used — but you should have used most of them at production scale.

Languages and runtimes: Go and / or Python at production scale. Comfort moving between typed and dynamic languages. JavaScript / TypeScript familiarity for adjacent work.

Cloud and infrastructure: AWS in production — ECS / Fargate, Aurora PostgreSQL, SQS, Lambda, KMS, IAM, CloudWatch, S3. Infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or CloudFormation). Comfort with cloud cost modelling and capacity planning.

Data and storage: PostgreSQL at depth — schema design, query performance, transactions. Redis for caching and queues. Event stores, message queues, and the design choices between them. Familiarity with MongoDB or other NoSQL stores is useful.

Architecture: Event-driven systems, API-first design, integration architecture, distributed systems, microservices and modular monoliths (and the judgement to pick the right one). Idempotency, retries, audit trails, eventual consistency.

Domain technology (preferred): Payments systems, virtual card / VAN orchestration, settlement and reconciliation, e-invoicing (Peppol, UBL), ERP or accounting integrations, identity and KYC flows, tax-tech, or comparable money-movement and compliance systems.

Engineering practices: CI / CD, DevSecOps, automated testing, code review, observability and monitoring, secret management, dependency and container scanning. Track record of building these into the team from day one — not bolting them on later.

We expect our technology leaders to leverage AI aggressively but responsibly.

You should have practical experience using tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Sonar, Semgrep, Playwright, and modern CI/CD workflows to accelerate development, testing, documentation, code review, and operations.

We are looking for builders who can create engineering leverage, not simply write more code.

A critical part of this role is building the next generation engineering team.

We expect our technology leader to identify, recruit, mentor, and retain A-players while creating a culture of ownership, quality, and speed.

Background in payments rails, virtual cards, e-invoicing, tax technology, hotel or travel tech, or reconciliation systems

Experience with the UAE or GCC market, regulatory environment, or partner ecosystem

A real point of view on AI as an engineering force-multiplier, paired with the discipline to use it without breaking the systems that matter

Real customers, real revenue from day one. 100+ enterprise clients including Fortune 500 names, consulting firms, airlines, and embassies. This is not idea-stage.

A category to build, not a feature to ship. UAE e-invoicing is mandated. The rail that moves money and tax data on top of it doesn't exist yet. You'd be building it.

Direct access to the founder. Fast decisions. No bureaucracy. No theatre.

Build the team your way. Authority to define the org, the bar, and the people who join.

Founder-track ownership. Base, meaningful ESOP, and the seat at the table that comes with shaping what we become.