Role: Head of TechnologyReports to: CTOLocation: Cairo, Egypt (on-site)ABOUT FLENDFlend is Egypt's leading digital SME lender and the only fully licensed digital NBFI focused on small and medium businesses. We have built a proprietary, end-to-end technology platform that originates, underwrites, disburses, and services loans in a fraction of the time of any conventional lender in the market — funding most clients within 24 to 72 hours through a fully digital process.We are FRA-regulated, backed by institutional investors, and funded by a growing panel of Egyptian and international banking partners. KEY RESPONSIBILITIESTechnology Strategy & Architecture• Own the three-year technology roadmap across the Loan Management System, credit and risk engines, partner integrations, data platform, customer-facing applications, and AI/ML capabilities.• Define and continuously evolve the architecture of Flend's proprietary platform — including service boundaries, data flows, integration patterns, and the principles that govern how new capabilities are added.• Sequence and trade off priorities between short-term product launches, medium-term platform investments, and long-term moats such as AI underwriting and embedded lending APIs.Platform Build & Hands-On Engineering• Personally lead the build-out of mission-critical systems, including the LMS enhancements, the universal credit scoring engine, the qualitative risk scoring engine, I-Score and AML integrations, the new products workflow, various pricing calculations, bulk repayments, and the self-service top-up experience.• Architect the data layer — consolidating partner, client, transactional, and risk data into a centralized data lake / warehouse that is securitization-ready and forms the foundation for all downstream AI and analytics work.• Own the customer-facing application stack, including the full redesign and rebuild of the Flend mobile app, direct-client onboarding flows, and the eventual WhatsApp-native loan management experience.• Build for multi-currency, multi-product, and multi-market from day one, ahead of USD lending launch and regional expansion — not retrofitted afterward.Engineering Organization & Leadership• Build, structure, and lead Flend's engineering organization, including hiring senior engineers, defining team topology, setting the engineering standards bar, and establishing the delivery cadence.• Embed a lean-by-design culture, consistent with Flend's broader operating model: small, high-leverage teams supported by deliberate automation rather than headcount scaling.• Establish engineering excellence practices across code review, testing, deployment, observability, incident response, and post-mortem discipline.Information Security & Regulatory Technology• Own Flend's information security posture end-to-end, including application security, infrastructure security, data protection, access management, vendor security, and incident response — to a standard appropriate for a regulated, institutional-grade lender.• Ensure regulatory and audit readiness across FRA reporting, AML automation, credit bureau filings, immutable audit logging, and the data-room requirements of debt providers, equity investors, and rating-relevant counterparties.• Implement explainable AI for every model-driven credit decision, in line with evolving FRA expectations and DFI/international-lender requirements.Data, AI & Underwriting Technology• Automate credit and risk scoring engines, evolving them from rules-based logic to machine-learning-augmented systems that improve accuracy, speed, and addressable client universe over time.• Automate predictive early-warning, dynamic pricing, and portfolio composition models that move Flend from periodic management judgment to continuously optimized, AI-guided risk and pricing decisions.• Establish model monitoring, drift detection, and an A/B testing framework so credit policy becomes a continuously optimized function rather than a periodic review.• Industrialize document intelligence and OCR-driven onboarding to eliminate manual data-entry friction across the client lifecycle.Partner Integrations & Embedded Lending• Harden and standardize all partner API integrations and establish a repeatable, productized integration playbook so each new partner is an onboarding rather than a custom build.• Productize Flend's lending engine into a set of APIs and SDKs that partners can embed into their own checkout, dashboards, or mobile apps — Flend's most scalable long-term distribution moat.• Build partner-facing dashboards that turn each partner relationship from a passive distribution channel into an actively engaged commercial ally with real-time performance visibility.Executive & Stakeholder Leadership• Sit on Flend's executive committee and contribute to overall company strategy, capital planning, and product decisions.• Represent Flend's technology and security posture externally in debt provider due diligence, equity raises, FRA interactions, partner integrations, and ecosystem forums.• Partner directly with the CEO, Head of Credit & Risk, Head of BD & Partnerships, Treasury, and Finance to translate commercial ambition into a technology roadmap that is sequenced, resourced, and delivered.Cloud Infrastructure Management• Own Flend's cloud infrastructure strategy, ensuring the platform is architected for resilience, scalability, and cost efficiency across all environments.• Design and implement data retention and disaster recovery frameworks that meet institutional-grade standards, including RPO/RTO targets appropriate for a regulated lender, immutable backups, and geographically distributed failover capability.• Establish infrastructure-as-code practices and environment management to ensure consistent, auditable, and reproducible provisioning across development, staging, and production environments.DevOps Discipline & Release Processes• Streamline the end-to-end CI/CD pipeline to enable frequent, reliable, and low-risk deployments — moving from periodic release windows to a continuous delivery model with automated testing and canary releases.• Define and enforce release governance, including versioning strategy, rollback procedures, environment promotion policies, and deployment approval workflows that satisfy both engineering velocity and regulatory compliance.• Instrument comprehensive observability across the entire platform — including structured logging, distributed tracing, real-time alerting, and SLO-driven operational dashboards — to make every deployment measurable and every incident diagnosable.Cybersecurity Adherence & Vendor Risk• Coordinate and oversee penetration testing programs, managing the full lifecycle from scoping and vendor selection through remediation tracking and retesting — ensuring Flend's platform is tested against evolving threat models at a cadence appropriate for a regulated financial institution.• Set cybersecurity priorities and drive the remediation roadmap, translating penetration test findings, threat intelligence, and regulatory requirements into a risk-prioritized backlog that is sequenced, resourced, and tracked to closure.• Identify and manage cybersecurity risks with vendors and third parties, including conducting security assessments of all technology vendors, integration partners, and cloud service providers; maintaining a vendor risk register; and ensuring contractual security obligations are met and periodically revalidated.REQUIRED EXPERIENCE & QUALIFICATIONSNon-Negotiable• Hands-on track record of building technology stacks for financial-services companies — meaningful, personally-led builds at a bank, NBFI, digital lender, payments company, fintech, or comparable regulated financial institution. Generalist software leadership without financial-services depth will not be a fit for this role.• Deep, current engineering skills. This role is hands-on. The successful candidate is still in the code, still in the architecture diagrams, and still owns the technical depth of the platform — not just the org chart above it.• Proven experience designing and operating core lending or banking systems, including some combination of loan management systems, credit scoring engines, payment rails, partner API integrations, and regulatory reporting infrastructure.• Experience leading engineering organizations end-to-end, including hiring, structuring teams, setting standards, and shipping at executive level• Information security and regulatory fluency, with demonstrable experience operating in an environment with regulated data, audit obligations, and institutional debt-provider scrutiny.Strongly Preferred• Direct experience building or operating lending platforms.• Hands-on work with data lakes / warehouses, model deployment, and applied ML in a credit, risk, or fraud context.• Experience embedding lending or payments capabilities into partner ecosystems via APIs and SDKs.• Familiarity with the Egyptian or wider MENA regulatory environment (FRA, CBE, I-Score, central bank AML frameworks).Personal Profile• A builder, not a manager of someone else's build.• Bias to ownership: comfortable being the single accountable owner of every technology decision at Flend.• Operates with both architectural rigor and product pragmatism — able to ship now without compromising what the platform must become.• High clock-speed, low-ego, and able to operate in a small, senior, fast-moving executive team.• Comfortable being the technical voice in front of investors, banks, regulators, and partners.HOW TO APPLY: careers@flend.ioCandidate submissions should include a CV, a short technical leadership summary highlighting two or three platforms personally built or led at a financial-services company, and (where available) references to architecture decisions, regulatory engagements, or scale milestones the candidate is most proud of.