Chief Technology Officer
Location: London or Dubai (with relocation to Dubai)
Sector: Online media, Scale up
Department: Technology & Operations
Reports To: CEO
Position: Full-Time
About us:
GlobalDrum enables brands to own, understand, and monetise their most valuable social audiences.
Using live first-party behavioral data, brands have the autonomy to operate diversified business models on demand
We are evolving our unique next-generation B2B2C Platform as a Service (PaaS) that operates on a globally distributed cloud infrastructure incorporating a scalable, event-driven architecture using the latest AI and data techniques to evolve an entire sector.
Located in London, Dubai, New York and Dubai, the Company is at the centre of reshaping how global brands will evolve in a sector valued at $276Bn in 2025 representing 30% of all digital ad spending. If this seems too ambitious for you, then don't apply.
Role Description:
If you’re passionate about innovation, relish solving business problems without precedent, like change, and have a strong intuition for what drives the monetisation of social audiences, then this role is for you.
We are seeking a visionary and execution-focused CTO to lead the architecture, development, and scaling of a next-generation PaaS that empowers brands to monetise their social audiences.
This platform will integrate with major social ecosystems, enabling seamless audience engagement, commerce, analytics, and revenue generation through tools such as subscriptions, digital products, creator collaborations, and AI-driven insights.
We are looking for a visionary, hands-on CTO to lead the architecture, engineering, and deployment of our new AI-native, multi-tenant Platform as a Service (PaaS). In this role, you won't just be managing from the top down—you will be laying the foundational code, designing the enterprise architecture, and embedding Agentic AI into the very fabric of our platform.
If you thrive in a fast-paced environment and have a proven track record of building massive, data-intensive global systems, we want you at the helm of our engineering team.
Qualifications:
* Architect & Build: Lead the end-to-end design and hands-on development of a scalable, secure, multi-tenant PaaS.
* Pioneer AI Integration: Drive our \"AI-first\" mandate by designing and implementing autonomous Agentic AI workflows that power core platform features.
* Scale Globally: Engineer and optimize large-scale, event-driven, real-time data pipelines capable of handling massive global throughput with near-zero latency.
* Ecosystem Integration: Seamlessly integrate our platform with mission-critical 3rd party services, including payment gateways, ad servers, and complex e-commerce backends.
* Lead by Example: Mentor and grow a world-class engineering team while remaining a key individual contributor in the codebase.
* Leading technology input: into product and platform roadmaps aligned to business priorities.
Required Experience:
* Online Media Experience (3+ years)
* Enterprise Architecture (3+ years): Deep expertise in designing complex, distributed, and highly available multi-tenant systems.
* Agentic AI (2+ years): Proven, hands-on experience building and deploying autonomous AI agents, LLM orchestration, and advanced AI workflows in production.
* Global Data Systems (3+ years): Strong background in large-scale, global, event-driven, and real-time data-intensive services (e.g., Kafka, Flink, EventBridge, or similar).
* Complex Integrations: Extensive experience connecting robust APIs and 3rd party services (Payment gateways like Stripe/Adyen, MarTech and AdTech platforms, e-commerce engines).
* Hands-On Mentality: You are a builder at heart. You write clean, scalable code and are comfortable making foundational technology stack decisions.
* Team leadership: Significant experience in senior technology leadership, ideally gained within digitally-driven, platform or media-led organisations. You'll have a track record of building and scaling high-performing teams, and bringing out the best in the people around you.
Bonus Points:
While not strictly required, exposure to the following will make you a standout candidate:
* Deep understanding of the Media and/or News technology ecosystems.
* Experience in AdTech (advertising networks, programmatic bidding, ad serving), data analytics, and eCommerce.
* A consulting or on-line media background, bringing a strategic, client-centric, and solution-oriented mindset to technical problem-solving.
Why Join Us?
* Become one of the leaders in reshaping value in the social media sector
* Lead the building of a ground-breaking AI platform from day one
* Competitive salary, bonus, and equity options creating a share of the venture.
* Flexible working environment