Chief Technology Officer

Location: Remote but would look at a relocation to Manila at some stage Type: Full-time, executive Reports to: Founders and shareholders

The job

You will own the technology for a national-scale digital trade platform that connects government agencies, financial institutions, and private operators into one system for electronic transactions. The company is the designated operating entity for this project, which means the contractual milestones, service levels, and uptime commitments sit with us, and the technology half of those commitments sits with you.

This is a hands-on role. In a typical month you will review architecture decisions, negotiate integration specs with a government agency's IT team, unblock a stalled vendor deliverable, and sit with engineers while they debug a production incident. We measure output in working systems, not strategy decks.

What you will do

Deliver the national platform. Own every technology milestone in the contract: agency onboarding, system integration, interoperability, data exchange, testing, technical acceptance, and production deployment. Manage delivery across internal teams, system integrators, vendors, and the agencies themselves, most of which run legacy systems and have their own procurement and approval cycles.

Build an AI-first engineering organisation. We want a small, fast team that uses AI across coding, testing, DevOps, security monitoring, documentation, support, and project management, so that a team of 30 does what a team of 100 used to. You will decide where AI replaces process, where it assists, and where it stays out. You will also keep evaluating new models, agents, and tools and move quickly when one changes the economics of a workflow.

Set the technology strategy. Define the architecture and roadmap for the platform and for the products that follow it. Decide what we build, what we buy, and what we integrate. Set the standards for security, infrastructure, development methodology, and governance, and advise the founders and shareholders on where to invest.

Recruit and run the team. Hire the engineering leadership, structure the organisation across development, architecture, infrastructure, DevOps, security, QA, data, and support, and set KPIs that cover delivery speed, reliability, security, quality, and cost. Reduce dependence on external providers wherever building in-house makes strategic sense.

What you will be measured on

• Technology milestones hit on the contractual dates
• Agencies and institutions onboarded and integrated
• Platform availability, performance, security, and incident response against agreed service levels
• Testing, technical acceptance, and production deployment signed off
• Engineering productivity, release quality, and technical debt under control

Who we are looking for

You have 12 to 20+ years in technology with real leadership responsibility: CTO, VP Engineering, Head of Technology, Chief Architect, or equivalent. You have shipped large transaction-based systems in fintech, payments, enterprise SaaS, or digital government. You have delivered a multi-agency or multi-institution system where the hard part was not the code but the coordination: APIs across organisations, legacy integrations, data exchange, and stakeholders who do not report to you.

You are already using AI in your own engineering work and can point to what it changed. You can go deep on architecture, cloud infrastructure, security, databases, and DevOps when the situation demands it. You have worked somewhere fast-moving, where priorities changed quickly and the plan changed with them.

Experience with government agencies, financial institutions, or regulated industries is a strong advantage.

Background. We are especially interested in executives from India's technology and fintech ecosystem, given the depth of large-scale platform experience there. You must be willing to relocate to the Philippines and work in person with the executive and operating teams.

The first 12 months

By the end of your first year you will have:

• Set a clear architecture and roadmap
• Assessed the existing team and hired the core engineering leadership
• Put an AI-first development and operating model in place
• Established the delivery framework for the national platform and its contractual commitments
• Driven the priority agency onboardings, integrations, and technical acceptance milestones
• Set scalable standards for development, DevOps, security, QA, documentation, and service levels
• Delivered the priority platforms on the agreed timelines

Beyond that, the goal is an organisation that can build and operate several mission-critical platforms at once, at national scale, with a team a fraction of the size the industry would expect.