Chief Technology Officer — Digital Lending Portfolio

The mandate

A digital lender is preparing to enter selected international markets. Its domestic platform is capable and fast-moving, but core assumptions about identity, bureau data, consent, payments, collections and cloud location do not hold everywhere. Copying the existing stack could create regulatory and customer failure; allowing every market to fork it would destroy engineering leverage. A new CTO will define the architecture and engineering model for responsible expansion.

Approximately 420 employees and material partners sit within engineering, architecture, reliability, security and technical product delivery. The accountable book, technology and investment perimeter is about ₹6,750 crore. The CTO will partner country, product, risk and operations leaders while retaining authority over platform integrity and production readiness.

The central choice is what constitutes the global core. Customer and account identifiers, ledger behaviour, decision orchestration and engineering controls may merit consistency; data sources, disclosures, payment rails and recovery treatment may require localisation. The CTO must turn those principles into enforceable boundaries, not architectural aspiration.

Model deployment adds another layer. A credit policy may be globally governed while features, training data and fairness expectations are local. The platform must record which model and rule produced each decision, support controlled overrides and retain evidence for challenge after versions change. The CTO will work with risk and data leaders on this lineage without assuming ownership of credit appetite. Engineering plans must also account for lower-quality connectivity, language, accessibility and manual-contingency needs in the target markets.

Why this seat is open

This planned new appointment was approved before the first cross-border launch. Domestic technology leadership remains in place and will become a key peer. The board wants a separate enterprise CTO so international deadlines do not force irreversible design shortcuts or distract the domestic platform from current commitments.

What you will own

• Define global-core and local-extension boundaries with versioning, data and ownership rules.
• Select target markets’ identity, bureau, payment and communications integrations through tested capability and exit criteria.
• Build security, privacy, model lineage and regulatory evidence into country delivery from inception.
• Establish production ownership, service objectives, observability and recovery across shared and local components.
• Sequence reusable capabilities before market launch while preventing platform work from becoming an indefinite dependency.
• Set engineering standards and developer experience that make the preferred architecture easier than unauthorised forks.
• Recruit market technical leaders and clarify decisions between central platform and country teams.
• Give the board honest readiness evidence, including conditions that warrant delaying launch.

The first 12 months

In the first 75 days, test the existing platform against two candidate-market journeys from application through repayment and hardship. Catalogue assumptions that fail, identify regulated-data boundaries and assess partner quality. Decide which domestic technical debt becomes an international launch blocker and which can remain contained.

By month four, approve the reference architecture, first market sequence, engineering organisation and launch gates. Contract critical local providers only after data access, resilience and exit are demonstrated. Establish a country sandbox using realistic edge cases, not only happy-path product flows.

The next six months should deliver reusable identity, decision, payment and disclosure interfaces, exercise cross-border incident response and complete a controlled launch. Measure manual intervention and local code divergence weekly. A second market should reuse proven components rather than clone the first implementation.

At year end, the first market should meet agreed customer and credit volumes with 99.95% critical-service availability; at least 70% of its platform capability should use governed core components; local forks should remain below the approved threshold; recovery and data-deletion obligations should be proven; and the second market should show a 30% faster technical lead time.

What the board will measure

• Safe launch and customer completion under local regulatory conditions.
• Reuse of governed components and containment of country-specific code.
• Reliability, security and recovery of shared services across time zones.
• Vendor and data-location compliance with credible exit arrangements.
• Engineering speed from the second market onward.
• Candour of readiness decisions when commercial deadlines conflict with evidence.

The person

You have 22–28 years in lending, fintech, payments or regulated-platform engineering. As CTO or equivalent, you have owned at least ₹3,950 crore of book, transaction or investment perimeter and 420 employees and partners. You have launched a regulated platform in more than one jurisdiction.

You can explain which capabilities you standardised, which you localised and the cost of getting either decision wrong. Your evidence includes production reliability, regulatory acceptance, engineering reuse and customer outcomes. Experience consisting only of domestic scale or unregulated international software is insufficient.

You are decisive without architectural dogma. Country teams should see legitimate local needs heard; platform teams should see boundaries protected. You will delay a launch when evidence is inadequate and take responsibility for creating that evidence early enough to avoid theatrical last-minute escalation.

Compensation and terms

Expected fixed remuneration is ₹3.2–4.6 crore plus performance variable and long-term incentive. Measures include safe launch, reuse, reliability, security, delivery and engineering capability. The permanent post is onsite in Bengaluru and follows a planned hiring timetable.

Confidentiality

The lender, target markets and providers will be revealed only after fit and conflicts screening under confidentiality. All jurisdictions, values and architecture clues are composite and must not be used for identification.