zero13
Website:
zero13.net
Job details:
Role Overview
ZERO13 is seeking an experienced and commercially-minded Chief Technology Officer to lead its technology strategy, engineering organisation, platform development and operational resilience. The CTO will take ownership of an existing technology estate and lead its development into a secure, resilient and scalable institutional fintech platform-as-a-service. A key part of the role will be managing the technology aspects of ZERO13’s separation from GMEX, incl. establishing clear ownership of systems, services, intellectual property, environments, documentation and operational responsibilities. This is an executive leadership role requiring strong technical credibility. The CTO must be able to challenge architecture and engineering decisions without becoming the principal developer or a bottleneck for the team.
Objectives
- Successfully delivering, operating and enhancing ZERO13’s technology
- Defining & executing the technology roadmap required to support ZERO13’s strategy
- Building & leading an effective technology organisation in India
- Establishing ZERO13’s technology independence from GMEX
- Maintaining a practical understanding of developments in blockchain, AI and related technologies
- Supporting the development of ZERO13’s commercial pipeline by shaping credible technical solutions for prospective customers & partners
- Supporting customer, investor, regulator & partner engagements with technical authority, incl. technical due diligence, architecture & security assurance, and the technical content of demonstrations and workshops
Key Responsibilities
Technology Strategy & Architecture
- Define ZERO13’s technology strategy and translate the agreed product and business roadmap into a realistic, sequenced technology roadmap
- Own the architecture and the platform data model across trading, clearing, settlement, custody, registry, blockchain, portals, data and external integrations, so that the platform presents a single consolidated source of truth
- Ensure platforms are secure, scalable, resilient, interoperable and maintainable, and set the non-functional standards for performance, availability and recovery that the platform is built to and measured against
- Establish clear architecture governance, engineering standards and system ownership
- Identify & manage technical debt, operational risks and critical technology dependencies
- Evaluate new technologies objectively and recommend their use where they provide a clear commercial or operational benefit
Engineering & Delivery
- Take executive responsibility for the delivery, enhancement and technical operation of ZERO13’s platforms, incl. availability, release management, monitoring, production support and incident management
- Work as a peer to the Product, Commercial, Operations & Compliance functions, converting agreed business and product requirements into technical designs, estimates and deliverables, and returning a clear view on feasibility, options and risk
- Establish effective processes covering technical analysis, architecture, development, testing, release and production support
- Ensure delivery plans are realistic, transparent and aligned with available resources
- Allocate engineering capacity across platform development, customer commitments, regulatory requirements, production support and technical-debt reduction, and make the trade-offs visible rather than absorbing them
- Improve delivery predictability, software quality, release discipline and operational ownership.
- Ensure defects and incidents are investigated, addressed and reviewed with full documentation throughout
- Set and lead ZERO13’s approach to applying AI within the engineering process: an explicit position on approved tools and data, practical adoption across analysis, prototyping, development, testing and documentation, and the controls that go with it, incl. human review and automated security scanning of generated code
- Measure the adoption, delivery impact and cost of AI-assisted development, and turn what works into shared engineering practice rather than leaving it to individual habit
- Define and stand behind the service levels ZERO13 commits to customers, and ensure the platform is instrumented to evidence them
Team Leadership
- Build, lead & develop ZERO13’s technology organisation in India
- Assess the existing team structure, skills and capacity and define the organisation required to support the business roadmap
- Recruit & develop strong leaders across architecture, engineering, data, DevOps, cybersecurity and quality engineering
- Establish clear roles, responsibilities and accountability across the technology function
- Create a culture of technical excellence, constructive challenge, customer focus, documentation and knowledge sharing
- Reduce dependency on individual employees, contractors or suppliers
- Manage technology headcount, budgets, suppliers and external development partners
- Develop a leadership bench with real depth, incl. succession for the key roles in the technology function
Security & Operational Resilience
- Ensure ZERO13’s platforms meet institutional standards for security, availability, performance and resilience
- Establish effective controls covering secure software development, incl. AI-assisted development, access management, vulnerability management, data protection & third-party risk
- Implement appropriate DevSecOps, automated testing, deployment, monitoring and observability practices
- Define production-support, incident-management & escalation arrangements covering relevant market and customer operating hours
- Establish and regularly test business-continuity & disaster-recovery capabilities
- Ensure material technology risks and incidents are reported clearly to the CEO and Board
- Own the technology elements of ZERO13’s separation and exit arrangements from the shared group provider, and prove them by test
Customer, Regulator & Partner Engagement
- Work with the Commercial & Product functions to shape technically credible and commercially viable customer solutions
- Contribute the technical content to proposals, solution designs and customer workshops led by the Commercial & Product functions, and lead technical due diligence on prospective commitments
- Provide the technical depth in platform demonstrations where the audience requires it, covering architecture, security, integration and performance
- Explain the platform’s architecture, security, resilience and capabilities clearly to customers, partners, investors and regulators
- Assess the cost, complexity, dependencies and risks of prospective commitments before they are agreed, and state plainly what can and cannot be committed to
- Flag where a customer-specific commitment would create one-off development, unsupportable variants or technical debt, so that the product function can decide whether to build a reusable capability instead
- Act as ZERO13’s senior technology authority with customers, regulators, investors, strategic partners & suppliers, incl. technical vendor selection and contract negotiation
- Lead ZERO13’s response to institutional customers’ & regulators’ technology due diligence, security questionnaires & audits
Essential Experience
- Significant experience as a CTO, Technology Director, Head of Engineering or senior technology leader
- Leading multidisciplinary engineering teams of comparable scale
- Tack record of hiring senior engineers & leaders, incl. in competitive markets for senior engineering talent
- Strong experience in financial-market infrastructure and/or B2B fintech, incl. areas such as exchanges, clearing, settlement, custody, depositories, payments, capital markets and digital assets
- Strong software-engineering background in high-integrity transaction systems, preferably incl. Java-based distributed systems, with the breadth to lead beyond a single language or stack
- Direct experience with distributed-ledger or tokenisation technology, sufficient to own that side of the architecture rather than delegating
- Practical, hands-on experience applying artificial intelligence, both within an engineering organisation and in the product itself
- Delivering & operating secure, highly available production platforms
- Cloud infrastructure, DevOps, cybersecurity and operational resilience
- Integrating complex internal and external systems using APIs, messaging or event-driven architectures
- Managing technology roadmaps, budgets, suppliers and competing business priorities
- Supporting customer proposals, technical demonstrations and solution design
- Able to communicate effectively with engineers, executives, customers, regulators and Boards
- Excellent written and spoken English
Education
A degree in computer science, software engineering or a related discipline is desirable.
Candidates with equivalent professional experience and a strong record of technology leadership will also be considered. The quality and relevance of the candidate’s experience are more important than attendance at a particular university.
Leadership Profile
- Strategic but pragmatic
- Technically credible without being overly hands-on
- Commercially aware and delivery focused
- Comfortable taking ownership of an established but evolving platform
- Able to explain complex technology clearly to non-technical audiences
- Disciplined about security, resilience and operational accountability
- Willing to challenge unrealistic assumptions and commitments
- Able to build strong teams and delegate effectively
- Transparent with the CEO & Board about progress, costs and risks
- Able to solve problems for the company rather than defend the technology function
- Focused on leverage rather than headcount, building the smallest capable team rather than the largest
- Willing to understand the existing platform and team before changing them, and to make durable changes rather than fast ones
- Able to work constructively with the current group technology organisation while ending ZERO13’s dependency on it
- Calm and decisive in a live production incident that has customer and regulatory consequences
- Personally fluent with modern engineering tooling, incl. AI, rather than delegating
Click on Apply to know more.