Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

About Leadex Systems

Leadex Systems builds integration and API management platforms for banks, payment providers and government entities across the Middle East, Cyprus and Europe. We are 60 people. We have been a MuleSoft partner for years and were named MuleSoft Partner of the Year Middle East 2024 and MuleSoft Partner Champion Middle East 2025.

Most of what we build lives in places where an integration failure is a regulatory event rather than a bad sprint: core banking, payments, onboarding, government service platforms. Our clients run central bank audits, ISO 20022 migrations and multi-year complex implementations. We sit in the middle of complex digital transformations as an integration team connecting overall IT/IS landscape together.

What this role is

We are hiring a CTO to own the technical side of the company: how we design solutions, how we deliver them, and how our engineering organisation grows.

You will report directly to founder (and current CTO) and CEO and sit on the leadership team. Day to day the job splits roughly three ways: architecture on our most complex programs, technical leadership of a distributed delivery team, and the engineering half of presales, where you shape the solution and defend it in front of a client's architecture board.

Our delivery portfolio today is mostly MuleSoft and Salesforce. We are not looking for a MuleSoft specialist. We are looking for an engineer who has spent a career on integration, has run genuinely hard programs, and can learn a platform in a quarter. If you have never touched Anypoint, we will get you through certification. What we cannot teach is the judgment that comes from having personally untangled a 200-interface landscape under a regulator's deadline.

What you will own

• Solution architecture on flagship engagements. The bids that decide our year, and the delivery programs that follow them. You set the architecture, you review the critical decisions, and you are the person the client's chief architect argues with.

• Engineering standards across the practice. Integration patterns, API design, CI/CD and release strategy, non-functional requirements, how we estimate. Today these live in people's heads and in past project artefacts; we want them written down and enforced.

• Technical presales. Technical discovery, solution design, effort estimation, and the architecture sections of RFP responses. Our deals are won or lost on whether the client believes the design will survive their environment.

• The technical organisation. Hiring architects and senior engineers, growing the people already here, deciding what capability we build next and what we buy. We want a mentor, not a gatekeeper.

• Technical direction beyond the current portfolio. Where the practice goes after MuleSoft and Salesforce, which platforms and which domains we invest in, and what that means for partnerships and certifications.

What we need from you

• 10+ years in software engineering, with a Java background  and a career spent on integration work in one form or another: ESBs, middleware, API platforms, event-driven systems, service layers over legacy cores.

• At least two large, multi-year, multi-system programs where you held architectural responsibility from discovery through production, not just a design document handed off to someone else.

• Real exposure to the banking or financial services sector: core banking systems, payment rails, regulatory and audit constraints, security review cycles that take longer than the build.

• Deep command of enterprise integration patterns and API design, including where REST stops being the right answer. A clear position on microservices versus SOA, and the scars to justify it.

• Experience leading distributed engineering teams across time zones, in Agile or hybrid delivery models.

• The ability to sit in front of a bank's architecture review board and hold your ground in English. Written and spoken fluency is non-negotiable; everything else about the role is discussable.

• Comfort with containers and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes or OpenShift) at the level of someone who has had to debug a production deployment, not just approve one.

Nice to have

MuleSoft or Salesforce experience, obviously, though it changes nothing about whether we talk to you. Beyond that, any of the following will get our attention:

• Hands-on history with other integration platforms: IBM Integration Bus, TIBCO, WSO2, Boomi, Apache Camel, Spring Integration. Migration projects off any of them are especially interesting.

• Banking and payment standards: ISO 20022, ISO 8583, SWIFT, Open Banking and PSD2, card scheme integrations.

• Identity and access: Keycloak, ForgeRock, Okta, Auth0, and the API security work that goes with them.

• Messaging and streaming at scale: Kafka, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, Solace.

• DevOps and observability: Jenkins, GitLab CI, TeamCity, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, plus cloud on AWS, Azure or OCI.

• Public sector or government delivery, where the procurement process is as much of an engineering constraint as the architecture.

• German, or Arabic, given where our clients are

Location, and the one restriction we have

We are distributed, and in general we do not mind where you live. One exception: our banking and government clients impose contractual conditions on where their data is processed and where our staff are based. Candidates currently located in Russia or Belarus will need to relocate before starting. We cover relocation to Cyprus, Germany or Poland, including visas, paperwork and the cost of moving. If you are already somewhere that works, stay where you are.

What we offer

• A C-level seat in a company small enough that your decisions take effect the same quarter you make them.

• Two interviews to an offer. We do not run six-stage processes.

• Relocation support to Cyprus, Germany or Poland if you need it.

• Flexible schedule, and no requirement to sit in an office for its own sake.

• 31 days of vacation, plus 5 sick days.

• Certification and training on whatever platform the role demands, MuleSoft included.