Overview
Head of Technology Jobs in Cairo, Egypt at Flend
Title: Head of Technology
Company: Flend
Location: Cairo, Egypt
Role: Head of Technology
Reports to: CTO
Location: Cairo, Egypt (on-site)
ABOUT FLEND
Flend 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 RESPONSIBILITIES
Technology 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 & QUALIFICATIONS
Non-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: [email protected]
Candidate 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.