Founding CTO

Job Description This is a remote position. Finkraft.ai Founding CTO Founding technology leader · Head of Engineering | Bengaluru · UAE · Hybrid | Full-time About Finkraft Finkraft is a B2B SaaS platform that helps enterprises recover what they're owed from the complexity of modern business travel and finance — starting with GST input tax credit recovery and reconciliation. We work with 100+ enterprises today, including Fortune 500 corporates, global consulting firms, airlines, embassies, and travel ecosystems. We're now building something larger: the finance operating system that sits between booking, identity, invoicing, payment, and reconciliation across the UAE and the wider GCC. Why this matters now Over the next 12–24 months, every business in the UAE moves to structured e-invoicing. Thousands of hotels, travel companies, corporates, banks, and payment providers will need to exchange invoices, payments, identities, and compliance records in real time — and they'll need something that makes that whole flow work end-to-end. Most companies see compliance plumbing. We see the chance to build the rail that moves money, settles invoices, and creates the trusted audit trail underneath the entire ecosystem. We have the customers, the regulatory tailwind, and a working architecture. What we need now is the technology leader to build it. The role You'll be our founding technology leader — the person who shapes the engineering function, owns the architecture, and partners with the founder on the calls that decide what Finkraft becomes. This is hands-on by design. You'll spend the first stretch close to the build, getting the next generation of the product into production and setting the technical bar. As we scale, you'll grow the team, the platform, and your own seat. What you'll own The architecture and engineering of the platform — across e-invoicing, payments, identity, reconciliation, and the integrations that connect to banks, ASPs, and hotel/travel systems The engineering team — hiring, structure, levelling, and the standard everyone is held to Production reliability and security for systems that handle money, tax-critical data, and enterprise customer information Engineering velocity and quality — shipping fast without shipping fragile, with the disciplines (testing, code review, security gates, observability) that make that real Technical strategy that ladders to commercial and product outcomes — and the ability to explain those trade-offs to a CFO, a salesperson, and a junior engineer with equal clarity Partnership with the founder on company direction, customer conversations, and the technical narrative we take into investor and partner rooms Your first challenge 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. Who you are 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 This role may not be a fit if 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. Requirements Technical experience we look for 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. AI-native engineering 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. Building the next team 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. Bonus, not required 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 Benefits What makes this different 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.