Black Pen Recruitment Opportunities

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

We are looking for a Deputy CTO in leading our client's entire technology organization. You will have end-to-end ownership across software development, infrastructure, platform engineering, and AI adoption, ensuring our digital wallet platform scales reliably across West Africa.

This role requires a technology leader who can operate across both the software development and infrastructure layers, manage multiple engineering teams, and drive the adoption of AI tools and practices across the organization.

Job Type: Full Time/Permanent

Workplace: Onsite

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

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

Please attach your CV in English

Requirements

• Must have: built core wallet based mobile money payments from scratch, themselves
• French fluency an added bonus
• Person should be a developer at their core
• 12+ years of experience in software engineering, with 5+ years in senior engineering leadership roles (VP Engineering, Head of Engineering, CTO, or equivalent).
• Proven experience leading both software development and infrastructure/platform teams.
• Strong background in fintech, payments, or digital wallet products.
• Hands-on understanding of backend systems (Go, Java, Ruby, or Python) and modern frontend/mobile stacks.
• Experience with AWS cloud-native architectures and managed services.
• Demonstrated experience implementing AI tools and practices within engineering teams.
• Experience managing teams of 30+ engineers across multiple disciplines.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to provide concise, direct answers and articulate technical decisions clearly.

Nice to Have

• Experience with African or emerging market payment ecosystems (mobile money, agent networks).
• Experience with multi-currency and cross-border payment systems.
• Startup or high-growth environment experience, particularly scaling from early stage.
• Familiarity with West African regulatory frameworks (central bank licensing, AML/KYC, data residency).
• Experience building back office, B2B portals, or e-commerce platforms.

Leadership Expectations

• Own business outcomes, not just engineering output.
• Be hands-on when needed - capable of diving into architecture, code, or incidents.
• Drive clarity in ambiguity - make decisions with incomplete information and communicate them crisply.
• Be a force multiplier through AI - continuously push the team to work smarter through tooling and automation.
• Build strong partnerships across Product, Risk, Platform, and Business teams.

Responsibilities

Software Development Leadership

• Lead and manage multiple development teams across backend, frontend, and mobile:
• Backend: Go (primary for payments), Ruby on Rails, Java, Python
• Frontend: React.js, Next.js
• Mobile: Kotlin Multiplatform (KMP), native Android (Kotlin) and iOS (Swift) Ensure high-quality delivery of fintech products: digital wallet, P2P transfers, payment gateway, merchant payments, lending, and airtime/bill payments.
• Own the technical roadmap for product development, balancing feature velocity with code quality and technical debt reduction.
• Experience developing back office portals, B2B platforms, and e-commerce systems is a plus.

Infrastructure & Platform Oversight

• Oversee the cloud infrastructure and platform engineering teams, ensuring stability, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Our client runs on AWS managed services. Familiarity with the following is expected: EKS (Fargate), Aurora PostgreSQL, ElastiCache Redis, SQS, S3, Lambda CloudFront, Kong API Gateway, CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana
• Cognito, ADOT Collector, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines
• Ensure the platform supports high TPS workloads with 99.9%+ uptime and cost-optimized operations.
• Experience with on-premise data centers is a plus but not required.

AI Adoption & Engineering Productivity

• Champion the adoption of AI tools across the engineering organization: AI-assisted development (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, or similar) AI-powered code review and quality assurance
• AI integration into CI/CD, testing, monitoring, and incident response
• Drive a culture where AI is embedded in daily engineering workflows, not just experimented with. The more practical examples of AI adoption in development teams you can bring, the better.
• Explore and implement AI-driven features within our client's products (personalization, fraud detection, risk scoring).

Team Management & Organizational Leadership

• Manage an engineering organization of 30+ engineers across multiple squads (backend, frontend, mobile, platform, QA).
• Own the hiring strategy for both in-house and outsourced teams, including vendor management and contractor performance.
• Define and track team KPIs, performance reviews, and career development paths. Build a high-performance engineering culture with strong ownership, accountability, and delivery predictability.

Product & Business Partnership

• Work closely with Product, Integrations, GTM, Support, and Business teams to translate business goals into technical execution.
• Represent the engineering organization in leadership and board-level discussions.
• Ensure engineering priorities are aligned with our clients business roadmap and regional expansion plans.