Group Chief Technology Officer

Group Chief Technology Officer

Company: Ark Capital

Role: Group Chief Technology Officer

Location: Nigeria (Abuja Preffered)

Seniority: Executive

Role Overview

Ark Capital is looking for an experienced, highly technical Chief Technology Officer to lead technology strategy, engineering execution, and product development across the Group and its portfolio companies.

This is not primarily an administrative technology leadership role. The CTO must remain technically capable, understand modern engineering deeply, and be able to work directly with engineering teams when required.

The core mandate is to build a highly efficient technology laboratory capable of rapidly developing products, deploying them to market, gathering real world feedback, iterating quickly, and continuously improving.

The successful candidate must be high agency, highly ambitious, and exceptionally self-driven. We are looking for someone who does not wait to be told what needs to be done, takes ownership of outcomes, identifies problems before they become bottlenecks, and relentlessly drives technology initiatives to completion.

Key Responsibilities

1. Group Technology Leadership

• Lead technology strategy and execution across Ark Capital and relevant portfolio companies.
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• Establish clear engineering priorities, timelines, standards, ownership, and accountability.
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• Ensure technology projects are delivered on time and to the required standard.
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• Identify bottlenecks within engineering teams and intervene directly where necessary.
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• Recruit, structure, mentor, and manage high performing technology teams.

2. Rapid Product Development

• Build a product development system that allows the Group to move rapidly from idea to prototype to production.
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• Establish frameworks for MVP development, testing, customer feedback, iteration, and scaling.
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• Reduce unnecessary development cycles and improve engineering velocity.
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• Create reusable technology infrastructure and components that can be deployed across multiple businesses.

3. Technical Architecture

• Maintain strong technical oversight of system architecture, infrastructure, security, databases, APIs, AI systems, blockchain infrastructure, and backend systems.
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• Ensure engineering teams use appropriate modern technologies, frameworks, developer tools, AI coding tools, infrastructure, and development methodologies.
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• Continuously evaluate emerging technologies that could materially improve development speed, product capability, or operating efficiency.

4. Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain & Quantitative Technology

• Provide technical leadership across AI engineering, machine learning systems, blockchain technology, smart contracts, digital assets, and distributed systems.
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• Support the development of quantitative trading infrastructure, financial models, data pipelines, execution systems, and risk systems.
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• Ensure these technologies are applied commercially rather than pursued simply for technical novelty.

5. Engineering Governance

• Establish engineering KPIs around development velocity, uptime, bugs, deployment frequency, security, technical debt, and project delivery.
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• Conduct architecture and code reviews where necessary.
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• Create clear documentation and development standards across companies.
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• Build strong cybersecurity, infrastructure resilience, testing, and deployment practices.

Ideal Candidate

The ideal candidate should:

• Have significant experience as a CTO, VP Engineering, Head of Engineering, Technical Founder, or equivalent senior technology leader.
• Be an accomplished full stack engineer capable of understanding and reviewing production systems.
• Have strong technical competence across backend engineering, blockchain engineering, artificial intelligence and quantitative finance technology.
• Have experience building technology products from zero to market.
• Have successfully managed multiple engineering teams or products simultaneously.
• Understand modern cloud architecture, DevOps, CI/CD, APIs, databases, cybersecurity, and scalable infrastructure.
• Understand quantitative trading systems, financial data infrastructure, or algorithmic trading technology.
• Be highly execution focused and comfortable taking direct responsibility for difficult technical problems.
• Have strong commercial judgment and understand that technology exists to create business outcomes.

Primary Objective

Build Ark Capital's technology ecosystem into an efficient product laboratory capable of repeatedly turning ideas into reliable market ready products, testing them rapidly, learning from customers, and improving them faster than any competitor.