CTO – Product and Engineering — Low-Carbon Platform

The mandate

A low-carbon platform has reached the point where product ambition exceeds engineering throughput. Teams are advancing tools for asset optimisation, customer energy management, carbon data and partner integration, but release confidence varies and architectural shortcuts are making each new feature harder to deliver. Capital discipline now requires a clearer link between product use, technical health and investment. The CTO must accelerate without trading away reliability.

The remit sits within an approximately AED 45,000 million operated asset and trading perimeter and covers roughly 825 employees and material partners. Engineers, product managers, data specialists, security teams and external developers work across products with different maturity and customer obligations. The CTO will determine which capabilities belong on a shared platform, which products merit independent speed and which experiments should end.

Reporting to the Group Chief Executive or designated executive committee sponsor, the appointee will partner with commercial, operating, finance and risk leaders. The chair, executive committee and principal capital sponsors expect release confidence, architecture health and productivity to become visible management facts rather than competing technical narratives.

Why this seat is open

The position is newly created and planned as part of the next product operating model. Current engineering leaders retain their teams until the remit is activated, but none owns the whole relationship between architecture, portfolio capital, product delivery and reliability. The four-to-six-month search is scheduled ahead of the following capital cycle and is not connected to an incumbent departure.

What you will own

• Establish one product-and-engineering portfolio showing user need, adoption, economic potential, technical health, security exposure, dependencies and total capacity consumed.
• Recommend where capital should increase, pause or stop, resisting the tendency to preserve every pilot because a senior sponsor remains interested.
• Define a modular architecture for shared identity, data, workflow, observability and partner integration, with clear boundaries for product-specific design.
• Improve delivery flow from discovery through deployment by reducing hand-offs, clarifying product and engineering accountability, and measuring blocked time as well as coding output.
• Set reliability objectives by product criticality, connect error budgets to release choices and ensure incident learning changes code, architecture or operating practice.
• Modernise engineering quality through automated testing, secure development, deployment controls and production telemetry without imposing a process heavier than the risk requires.
• Build product, platform, data and reliability leadership with explicit decision rights; strengthen internal technical career paths and reduce dependency on opaque supplier capacity.
• Present capital sponsors with an honest view of value and technical liability, including products whose adoption does not justify continued investment.

The first 12 months

During the first 90 days, reconstruct delivery and reliability evidence across the portfolio. Review failed releases, recurring incidents, architectural concentration and capacity lost to unplanned work. Meet users and commercial owners to test whether roadmaps reflect actual adoption barriers. Agree a segmentation of critical products, growth products and experiments, each with different assurance and funding rules.

By month six, stop or contain low-evidence initiatives and redirect capacity towards the most valuable bottlenecks. Establish product-level reliability objectives, dependency ownership and a quarterly architecture decision process. Select two delivery streams for end-to-end improvement, measuring lead time, change failure, recovery and user adoption from a clean baseline.

Months seven through ten should demonstrate faster release flow without an increase in production instability. Address the largest shared-platform constraint, bring critical supplier work under transparent technical ownership and appoint missing engineering leaders. Product reviews should combine commercial evidence with architecture and service health rather than treating them as separate agendas.

At twelve months, the board should have a capital-ranked product portfolio, healthier shared foundations and predictable delivery across the priority streams. Engineering productivity must be visible as usable customer and operating value, not lines of code, story points or reduced testing.

What the board will measure

• A 30% reduction in median lead time for the two priority delivery streams, with scope and starting baseline independently agreed.
• Change-failure rate below 10% for critical products and a 25% reduction in time to restore service after priority incidents.
• At least 15% of engineering capacity released from stopped work, repeated manual activity or avoidable incident demand and reassigned to funded priorities.
• Adoption targets achieved for three capital-priority products, supported by active-use and retention evidence rather than deployment counts.
• Closure of the five highest architecture or security exposures by agreed dates, with no overdue critical remediation hidden in product backlogs.
• Ready-now succession for 70% of direct reports and improved retention of designated principal engineers and product leaders.

The person

You are a CTO, SVP Engineering or Product Technology Head with 18–22 years of experience in energy technology, industrial software, climate platforms, utilities or another product environment where service failure has physical or commercial consequences. You have scaled throughput and reliability together and can explain architecture choices in capital language.

Applicants must have owned at least AED 26,100 million in P&L, book, budget or accountable portfolio and led 575 or more employees. Your record should include stopping products, simplifying architecture, improving production engineering and developing strong technical leaders. A background focused solely on outsourced delivery management will not satisfy the requirement.

The role is hybrid and anchored in Abu Dhabi, with international relocation supported. Material time with engineering teams, users and operating partners is expected.

Compensation and terms

The indicative package is AED 1.9–2.7 million fixed plus annual incentive and LTI. Final calibration will reflect portfolio scope and current mix; long-term awards carry standard vesting, performance and conduct conditions. Notice up to six months may be incorporated into the appointment schedule.

Confidentiality

The platform, products, customers, partners and technical findings remain undisclosed during initial assessment. Identity and detailed evidence are available only after qualification, reciprocal interest and confidentiality protections.