Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
Location: Lagos, Nigeria (Hybrid)
Industry: Fintech | Digital Banking | Payments | Mobile Money
Experience Level: 15+ Years
Employment Type: Full-Time | Executive (C-Level)
Reports To: Chief Executive Officer / Board of Directors
Monthly Net Salary: 2,000,000 2,500,000

About the Organization

Our client is a fast-growing Pan-African digital financial institution committed to transforming access to finance, powering SME digitization, supporting cross-border trade, and expanding financial inclusion across Africa. The organization is set to launch operations in Nigeria under a Microfinance Bank (MFB) license, with a strategic roadmap to evolve into a fully digital commercial bank serving retail, SME, enterprise, and merchant segments across multiple African markets.

With a mission to build Africa's most intelligent, trusted, and inclusive financial technology ecosystem, the institution will innovate across digital payments, lending, forex access, merchant enablement, cross-border commerce, and digital wealth solutions.

Role Overview

The Chief Technology Officer (CTO) will be responsible for shaping and executing the banks technology vision, architecture development, platform engineering, and technology-led innovation. The role demands a bold, future-focused, and execution-driven leader with proven experience scaling digital banking or fintech platforms across Africa, particularly in high-volume payments, cloud-first architectures, and regulated environments.

The successful candidate will build a world-class engineering culture, strengthen cybersecurity posture, drive digital resilience, and deliver a platform capable of scaling across multiple jurisdictions.

Key Responsibilities

1. Technology Strategy & Architecture

• Develop a multi-year technology and engineering strategy aligned with business scale and market expansion.

• Architect a scalable and secure Pan-African digital banking technology stack adaptable to multi-currency, multi-jurisdiction environments.

• Lead transition from an MFB technology model to a full commercial banking digital infrastructure.

2. Engineering Leadership & Delivery Excellence

• Build, lead, and mentor high-performing engineering teams across Backend, Mobile, Cloud, DevOps, QA, SRE, and Data Engineering.

• Implement Agile methodologies with disciplined release management, reliability metrics, and uptime standards.

• Lead the development and optimisation of key digital capabilities including onboarding, payments, lending, APIs, merchant services, and remittances.

3. Core Banking, Infrastructure & Integrations

• Lead selection, implementation, and optimisation of core banking, payments infrastructure, and system integration.

• Ensure high availability, resilience, automated CI/CD environments, monitoring systems, and cloud operations.

• Oversee integrations with NIBSS, card schemes, telcos, processors, regulators, and global cloud partners.

4. Cybersecurity, Compliance & Risk Management

• Own enterprise cybersecurity strategy, identity management, access controls, and infrastructure defense.

• Ensure regulatory compliance with frameworks such as CBN, NDPR, PCI-DSS, SOC, ISO 27001, and African regional standards.

• Lead disaster recovery, business continuity, and fraud mitigation strategies.

5. Technology Operations, Governance & Vendor Oversight

• Manage technology operations, vendor relationships, licensing, SLAs, audits, and infrastructure procurement.

• Establish technology governance frameworks covering compliance, risk, and platform lifecycle management.

6. Ecosystem Partnerships & Innovation

• Develop partnerships with cloud hyperscalers, fintech innovators, telcos, API platforms, and ecosystem builders.

• Participate in technology due diligence for partnerships, acquisitions, and regional expansion.

7. Leadership, Culture & Executive Alignment

• Build a high-performance engineering culture grounded in innovation, ownership, accountability, and security-first thinking.

• Represent the technology organisation at board level while closely partnering with Product, Risk, Operations, Finance, and Compliance stakeholders.

Qualifications & Experience Requirements

Education

• Bachelors degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or related fields (required).

• Masters degree or professional certifications (Cloud, Cybersecurity, DevOps, Digital Banking) are an added advantage.

Experience

• Minimum 15+ years in progressive technology leadership roles.

• 58 years at CTO, CIO, VP Engineering, or comparable senior capacity.

• Proven track record building and scaling digital banking, fintech, payments, or mobile money environments.

• Experience operating across multiple African markets is highly desirable.

Technical Expertise

• Deep expertise in cloud-native systems (AWS, Azure, GCP), microservices architecture, DevOps, CI/CD, and containerisation.

• Strong understanding of core banking systems, switching, authentication, identity, and high-volume transaction systems.

• Demonstrated experience architecting secure, scalable, API-driven platforms.

Leadership Competencies

• Visionary thinker with strong operational discipline.

• Exceptional communication and board-level engagement capability.

• Highly resilient, adaptable, and passionate about emerging markets and financial innovation.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

• Platform uptime, resilience, and cybersecurity posture

• Roadmap delivery timeline and product release velocity

• Regulatory compliance and risk audit outcomes

• Engineering team productivity, retention, and performance

• Cost optimisation and technology investment ROI

• Market scalability and successful multi-country deployments

How to Apply

Interested and qualified candidates should send their CV and a brief cover email to:

hiring@mysigma.io
Subject Line: Application Chief Technology Officer (CTO)