Chief Technology Officer
Chief Technology Officer (CTO) 📍 Dubai, UAE | Reports to: CEO | Full-time, Executive Leadership Our client, a leading global provider of background verification, screening and compliance services to governments, regulators and employers, is hiring a hands-on, AI-native Chief Technology Officer to lead its next phase of platform growth and business transformation. ABOUT THE ROLE The CTO will own all technology delivery: architecture, engineering quality, live platform operations, security, data and AI-enabled verification. This is a deeply technical executive role for someone who will roll up their sleeves, challenge engineering assumptions and personally drive AI-enabled development practices. Direct reports: Team of Engineering, Head of Data & AI, Head of DevOps & Security, Head of QA Budget: Full Technology P&L (development, infrastructure, tooling, vendor contracts, live service support) Team: ~60–80 engineers across multiple global locations Hiring From : Product Based Organisations only KEY RESPONSIBILITIES Technology Strategy & Architecture - Own and deliver a multi-year engineering roadmap aligned to business growth - Lead the evolution of a cloud-native, microservices core platform (AWS) - Champion AI-first engineering, including AI-assisted coding, code review and testing - Make commercially grounded build vs. buy vs. partner decisions Platform & Product Engineering - Own end-to-end delivery of the verification engine, API marketplace, client and regulator portals, and document processing engines - Scale the platform to tens of millions of verifications a year with sub-second response times - Consolidate legacy and new platforms into one unified, right-sized engineering organisation AI, Data & Intelligent Automation - Build and deploy OCR, NLP and computer vision models for automated document verification - Implement fraud detection for document tampering, credential forgery and identity misuse - Drive data strategy end-to-end: governance, warehousing, analytics and MLOps - Use LLMs and AI coding tools (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, etc.) to raise engineering velocity Security, Compliance & Risk - Ensure compliance with ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR, PDPA, DPDP (India), ADGM and DIFC - Define and enforce zero-trust architecture, encryption and data residency standards - Lead incident response, business continuity, vulnerability management and penetration testing - Own technology risk reporting to the Board and CEO Engineering Leadership - Move to a product-squad-based organisation with a strong DevOps culture (CI/CD, IaC, automated testing) - Track DORA-aligned KPIs: deployment frequency, lead time, MTTR, defect escape rate - Attract, develop and retain top engineering talent Innovation & Executive Accountability - Evaluate real-time verification APIs, e-KYC/digital identity and blockchain credential registries - Serve as the technology voice on the Executive Leadership Team - Own the technology budget and act as technical spokesperson to investors, regulators and key clients WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a related field - 20+ years in technology leadership, including 5+ years as CTO, VP Engineering or Head of Engineering at a high-growth company - Proven record of scaling SaaS platforms to millions of API calls/transactions per day - Experience leading distributed engineering teams of 40+ - Deep domain expertise in RegTech, FinTech, GovTech, HRTech or digital identity/background verification - Hands-on experience shipping production AI/ML: document intelligence, OCR, NLP, fraud detection - Strong cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure) and microservices/event-driven architecture credentials - Cybersecurity leadership: ISO 27001, SOC 2, zero-trust, incident response - Experience consolidating engineering organisations while improving output and reducing cost Preferred - Experience leading teams across Europe and the