Chief Technology Officer, Prop Trading and CFD Brokerage Group, Dubai

Emerald Zebra on behalf of our client, a well established global fintech group operating a leading (soon to be DFSA licenced) multi-asset prop trading firm and a regulated multi-asset CFD broker is looking to hire a Chief Technology Officer to be based in Dubai, UAE or Malaysia.

The company

The group operates two businesses: an established multi-asset prop trading firm with a large global trader base, and a premium multi-asset broker built for MENA and beyond, currently working towards its DFSA licence. Together they are building a complete trading ecosystem. The group is now building the engineering foundations to sustain a multi-decade business: ultra-reliable, highly scalable, compliance-ready and AI-native. The engineering organisation spans multiple countries, including the UAE, Bangladesh and Malaysia.

The role

As Chief Technology Officer you own the engineering organisation, technology strategy and infrastructure across the group. Reporting directly to the Group Co-Founders, you are responsible for how the group builds: the reliability, scalability, security and velocity of everything both businesses run on.

This is a pure engineering and platform mandate. You partner closely with the CPO on what gets built; you own how it gets built, how it scales and how it stays up. You are the technical authority for all architecture decisions, the owner of engineering culture and capability, and the leader accountable for platform stability across both businesses.

Technology strategy and architecture leadership

• Define and execute the group's long-term technology strategy, establishing the architectural roadmap that supports both prop trading and brokerage operations.
• Lead all major architectural decisions with deep grounding in scalability, reliability, observability and modern cloud-native engineering practices.
• Establish a clear separation between platform (shared services and infrastructure) and product (business-facing feature delivery) to reduce duplication and accelerate delivery velocity.
• Build shared services, data infrastructure and foundational platform capabilities that serve both businesses without creating coupling or delivery bottlenecks.
• Drive the architecture required to support multi-asset expansion, including CFD, Futures and Crypto business lines, ensuring the platform can absorb new instruments without structural re-work.

Trading platform reliability and performance

• Ensure 24/7 availability and ultra-low latency execution across all trading environments, evaluation programmes and brokerage alike.
• Define and enforce clear SLOs, observability frameworks, incident management protocols and post-incident review processes across both platforms.
• Oversee the stability, performance and resilience of all trading platforms, including MetaTrader integrations, execution routing, liquidity provider connectivity and order management systems.
• Establish and maintain robust disaster recovery and business continuity frameworks, ensuring no single point of failure in trading infrastructure.
• Lead optimisation of integrations across CRM, back-office, payment systems, liquidity bridges and client portals to ensure end-to-end reliability.

Shared platform infrastructure and ecosystem build

• Architect and deliver the shared infrastructure underpinning the group ecosystem, including unified KYC/AML verification, single sign-on, cross-platform referral tracking and affiliate infrastructure.
• Build the technical foundations for the prop-firm-to-broker conversion flywheel, enabling seamless account transitions, shared identity and cross-platform data flows.
• Own the data infrastructure strategy: warehousing, real-time analytics pipelines and the tooling that enables product, risk and finance teams to operate from a single source of truth.
• Evaluate build vs buy decisions for key platform components, including payment gateways, KYC providers, risk engines and trading infrastructure, with a clear framework for vendor governance and progressive internalisation.

Engineering capability and operating model

• Lead, grow and develop the engineering organisation across multiple countries and jurisdictions, building a high-performance, accountable engineering culture rooted in craft, velocity and ownership.
• Define and implement a modern engineering operating model: squad-based delivery, clear domain ownership, OKR-aligned execution and continuous improvement rituals.
• Drive best practices across the full engineering lifecycle: CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, deployment safety, on-call culture and production readiness reviews.
• Attract, develop and retain world-class engineering talent across backend, frontend, DevOps, data engineering, QA and security functions.
• Establish and enforce engineering standards, coding practices and architectural governance that scale with the organisation without becoming bureaucracy.

Security, compliance and regulatory readiness

• Lead cybersecurity strategy, risk mitigation and regulatory technology compliance across all systems, with particular focus on the broker's DFSA licensing requirements and data sovereignty obligations.
• Embed compliance- and risk-by-design principles into engineering workflows: auditability, access controls, data governance and immutable audit trails.
• Ensure all technology systems meet the data protection, cybersecurity and regulatory standards required across the group's operating jurisdictions, including the UAE, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Cyprus.
• Partner closely with Risk and Compliance to ensure platform infrastructure supports regulatory examinations, client money segregation requirements and trading record retention obligations.
• Oversee technology readiness for DFSA licensing milestones, ensuring the broker's infrastructure, controls and security posture meet regulatory expectations before commercial launch.

AI-native engineering and future readiness

• Drive an AI-builder mindset across engineering: evaluate and deploy AI/ML capabilities that create genuine operational leverage, such as intelligent monitoring, anomaly detection, automated compliance checks and predictive infrastructure scaling.
• Institutionalise AI-assisted engineering workflows to accelerate delivery, reduce toil and improve code quality across the team.
• Build the data and ML infrastructure required to support AI-powered product features developed with the CPO, including real-time trader analytics, personalisation engines and risk intelligence tools.
• Ensure the technology architecture remains adaptable to emerging asset classes, trading modalities and regulatory technology requirements over the long term.

Vendor and infrastructure management

• Manage all technology vendor relationships, including trading platform providers, cloud infrastructure, security vendors and third-party integrations, with a clear governance framework and cost optimisation discipline.
• Define and execute cloud or hybrid infrastructure strategy, balancing performance, cost, regulatory data residency requirements and operational resilience.
• Oversee infrastructure cost management as the organisation scales, ensuring technology spend tracks revenue growth without disproportionate overhead.

What you bring

• 12+ years of technology leadership experience, with a minimum of 5 years in a senior leadership role within fintech, brokerage or trading platform businesses.
• Deep understanding of CFD and/or prop trading infrastructure: MetaTrader 4/5 integrations, bridge systems, liquidity provider connectivity, execution routing and back-office architecture. Must have worked in the sector with specific exposure to trading infrastructure.
• Proven experience scaling engineering organisations across multiple distributed hubs, with strong people leadership and engineering culture development credentials.
• Strong grounding in cloud-native architecture, distributed systems, real-time data infrastructure and high-availability system design.
• Demonstrated track record of owning platform reliability, including SLO design, observability frameworks, incident response and continuous improvement in trading-critical environments.
• Experience embedding compliance, data governance and security controls into engineering workflows in regulated financial services environments.
• Strong vendor management capability, including build vs buy decision frameworks, contract governance and infrastructure cost optimisation.
• Hands-on technical credibility sufficient to lead architecture reviews, challenge technical proposals and earn the respect of senior engineers.

To apply, send your CV via this advert. All applications are handled in confidence.

Donna Stephenson, founder and principle recruiter, Emerald Zebra, specialist recruitment and executive search.