Title: Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
Reports to: Chief Executive Officer (CEO)
Location: East Africa
Role of Dekaya
At Dekaya, we are a CTO consultancy firm that acts as an intermediary managing the full hiring process on behalf of our client. Our client is a 10+ year old technology-driven organization in the communication space, building a global communications platform.
Overview
The Chief Technology Officer is the company’s top technical executive, accountable for defining and executing the technology vision that powers a developer-first communications platform at internet scale. This role owns the entire technology strategy, architecture, and execution — ensuring the platform’s reliability, scalability, and continuous innovation. The CTO partners closely with the CEO and executive team to align the technology roadmap with business strategy, customer growth, and long-term competitive positioning.
Key Responsibilities
1. Technology Vision and Strategy
- Define and maintain the company’s technical vision and long-term architecture strategy for communications APIs, platform services, and cloud infrastructure.
- Lead the technology roadmap development across all products.
- Translate business goals and product priorities into actionable engineering and infrastructure strategies.
- Evaluate emerging technologies, standards, and protocols shaping developer platforms and communication systems.
- Oversee security, compliance, and privacy architectures meeting telecom and enterprise standards (SOC2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA where applicable).
2. Architecture and Product Infrastructure
- Own the architectural design of all platform systems, including real-time communications, distributed microservices, and developer tooling.
- Ensure the platform achieves world-class levels of scalability, latency, and reliability.
- Oversee system evolution toward event-driven, API-first, and cloud-native patterns with ability for the platform and it’s architecture to deploy and work on prem.
- Direct R&D on new protocols, data models, and service orchestration layers that expand platform capabilities.
3. Engineering Leadership and Organizational Design
- Build and lead a world-class engineering organization across platform, infrastructure, security, and developer experience domains.
- Recruit, mentor, and manage senior technical leaders including the VP of Engineering, VP of Product Engineering, Heads of Architecture, VP of Product, Technical Support, Software Engineers, Product Managers, Devops Engineers, Telecom Engineers and SRE.
- Drive team performance through clear objectives, measurable outcomes, and a culture of ownership, execution, and delivery excellence.
- Foster leadership growth, collaboration, and accountability at all levels to ensure consistent delivery of strategic and technical goals.
- Instill engineering discipline, accountability, and continuous delivery culture.
- Balance innovation with operational rigor through structured technical governance.
- Leads by example through active coding, prototyping core functions, and setting engineering excellence standards hands-on.
4. Security, Reliability, and Compliance
- Establish and enforce company-wide standards for data protection, privacy, and regulatory compliance (e.g., GDPR, ISO 27001 ).
- Ensure platform uptime, incident response, and disaster recovery meet enterprise-grade SLAs.
- Oversee the Security and Reliability Engineering functions to safeguard infrastructure and customer data.
5. Executive Collaboration and Business Alignment--
- Serve as the CEO’s principal advisor on technology strategy, product feasibility, and technical differentiation.
- Partner with Product, Sales, and Finance leadership to align technical investments with revenue and margin goals.
- Represent the company’s technical direction to investors, partners, and customers.
- Guide pricing, ecosystem integrations, and developer experience initiatives from a technology-first perspective.
Qualifications
Professional Experience
- Minimum 10 years of engineering leadership, including 3+ years in executive-level roles overseeing large-scale SaaS, communications, or API-first technology organizations.
- Proven success in designing, scaling, and operating distributed systems supporting global traffic and high availability.
- Deep domain expertise in cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and on-premise infrastructure, real-time communication architectures, networking, databases, API platform engineering, and developer ecosystem enablement.
- Demonstrated ability to define and execute long-term technology vision aligned with business growth and platform scalability.
- Prior experience leading technology strategy within a high-growth or venture-backed startup strongly preferred.
- Background in telecommunications, event-driven systems, or large-scale messaging and streaming platforms is highly desirable.
Skills and Core Competencies
- Strategic and systems-level thinker with the capacity to architect multi-layered technology stacks and long-range infrastructure strategies.
- Exceptional technical judgment and decision-making ability across competing priorities of innovation, cost, and reliability.
- Proven record of building, mentoring, and scaling world-class engineering and product development organizations.
- Expertise in agile software delivery, continuous deployment, and DevOps automation frameworks.
- Strong command of reliability engineering, observability, and security-by-design principles.
- Ability to align technology investments with revenue, cost, and growth objectives.
- People management : Leads cross-functional engineering teams with precision, ensuring alignment, accountability, and timely delivery of complex initiatives.
- Project Management : Excels in resource optimization, talent development, and driving scalable, high-performance execution across global technology organizations.
- Skilled in organizational leadership, technical governance, and executive communication.
- Capability to influence and inspire cross-functional teams to achieve outstanding results.
- Adept at translating complex business requirements into scalable and economically viable technology solutions.
- Experienced in cybersecurity, compliance (GDPR, SOC 2, HIPAA), and risk management frameworks.
- Composure and precision in managing crises, technical incidents, or rapid environmental shifts in high-pressure contexts.
- Track record of managing large technology budgets and aligning expenditure with strategic ROI metrics.
Education
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field required.
- Master’s degree or equivalent postgraduate qualification in Technology Management, Computer Science, or Business Administration is an added plus.
