Head of Engineering

AI summary

IT Horizons Limited is hiring a Head of Engineering to lead and scale its multi-disciplinary engineering organisation across backend, frontend, mobile, infrastructure, and QA. Reporting to the CTO, the role owns engineering culture, technical roadmap, AI-driven development adoption, and global engineering standards across fintech products. This is a full-time executive position based in Lagos, Nigeria.

• Executive engineering leadership role reporting directly to the CTO
• Own engineering culture, technical roadmap, and AI adoption strategy
• Lead multi-disciplinary teams across backend, frontend, mobile, DevOps, and QA
• Focus on global fintech compliance including PCI-DSS, SOC 2, and GDPR
• Full-time position based in Lagos, Nigeria

Original source description

Head of Engineering at IT Horizons Limited ⏲ Sep 2, 2026, 11:02 AM ⋕ View all Engineering jobs IT Horizons is Africa’s partner of choice in all things relating to Information Communication Technology, (ICT). With a staff strength rich in knowledge, skill and expertise, we have all it takes to attend to all your technology needs. Our ultimate goal as a brand is to drive a world-class transformation through your business using technology Our focal point is technology-enabled solutions and professional services for today’s businesses and innovation that shapes tomorrow’s business world. We are recruiting to fill the position below: Job Title: Head of Engineering Location: Lagos Employment Type: Full-time The Opportunity The Head of Engineering is one of the most consequential hires we will make. It is a role for someone who wants to set the direction of engineering at a company that is building something genuinely important in global tech space — and who has the track record to prove they can do it. This is an executive role with real ownership — over our engineering culture, our technical roadmap, our adoption of AI-driven development practices, and the performance of every engineering team across the company. You will report directly to the CTO and work shoulder-to-shoulder with product, compliance, sales / growth, and business leadership to ensure that what we build is not only technically excellent, but globally competitive. You will inherit a talented team and be expected to make it significantly better — faster, more reliable, more innovative, and more autonomous. This is not a role for someone who wants to manage processes. Core Responsibilities: Engineering Leadership & Team Excellence: Drive talent strategy: define levelling frameworks, run structured performance reviews, and build succession plans that reduce key-person risk at every level of the org. Own metrics and engineering performance data. Use deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and MTTR as the baseline for measuring and improving team effectiveness — and be ready to present these to executive leadership. Lead, mentor, and scale a multi-disciplinary engineering organisation — across backend, frontend, mobile, infrastructure (DevOps), and QA — setting a culture of ownership, craft, and continuous improvement. Establish and maintain a robust engineering management layer: hire and develop Engineering Managers, set clear expectations, and build the feedback loops that keep high performers engaged and growing. Global Engineering Standards & Technical Governance: Coordinate and lead a team to review technical decisions, manage architectural debt, and ensure that standards evolve as the business scales. Champion a platform engineering mindset: build internal tooling, shared infrastructure, and developer platforms that multiply team productivity rather than creating bespoke solutions for every product. Lead the engineering team through compliance requirements: relevant to global fintech operations, including data residency, PCI-DSS, SOC 2, GDPR, and applicable African regulatory frameworks. Define, document, and enforce global software engineering standards — covering architecture principles, code quality, security practices, API design, testing requirements, and release management — that apply consistently across all products and all geographies. AI-First Engineering Mandate: Partner with other internal teams to define and deliver ML/AI features within our fintech products — including fraud detection models, anomaly detection, predictive cashflow tools, and intelligent reconciliation systems. Spearhead the company's AI adoption strategy across all engineering functions — from AI-assisted coding (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude or equivalent) to AI-driven QA, intelligent observability, self-healing infrastructure, and predictive analytics pipelines. Evaluate, pilot, and systematically roll out AI tools that measurably improve engineering velocity, code quality, and system reliability — with defined success metrics and rollout playbooks for each. Build organisational AI fluency: run internal capability programmes, establish AI usage guidelines, and ensure engineers at every level are equipped to work effectively alongside AI systems. Architecture, Infrastructure & Reliability: Lead the migration or modernisation of any legacy systems that create technical debt, risk, or velocity constraints — with clear business cases, timelines, and risk mitigation plans. Embed self-healing infrastructure capabilities: automated remediation, intelligent alerting, and proactive capacity planning that reduce manual toil and improve system resilience over time. Own the end-to-end technical architecture across our SaaS platforms, mobile apps, and enterprise systems — ensuring they are scalable, resilient, maintainable, and designed for global operation. Drive a cloud-native, infrastructure-as-code culture with high standards for uptime, disaster recovery, and zero-trust security. Define and enforce SLOs and SLAs across all production systems. Product & Cross-Functional Alignment: Participate in executive planning cycles: contribute technical perspective to business strategy, M&A due diligence, partnership evaluations, and build/buy/partner decisions. Partner tightly with the Product Team, Growth/Sales and other stakeholders within the organisation to translate product strategy into engineering roadmaps — with realistic timelines, clear dependencies, and honest risk communication. Act as the internal voice of engineering credibility — representing technical trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders without obscuring complexity or over-simplifying risk. Drive cross-border product delivery, ensuring engineering teams understand the technical nuances of multi-currency systems, real-time payment rails, regulatory reporting, and international data compliance. Engineering Velocity & Delivery Excellence: Drive engineering OKRs based on business expectations, review quarterly with executive leadership i.e. expectations vs outcomes. Implement and continuously refine a delivery system — sprint cadences, release pipelines, incident management protocols, and post-mortem cultures — that makes the team faster without sacrificing quality. Build a world-class CI/CD capability: fully automated test suites, progressive delivery mechanisms (feature flags, canary releases, blue-green deployments), and deployment pipelines that make shipping safe and frequent. Set a high bar for observability: ensure all production systems have comprehensive logging, distributed tracing, and dashboards that give the team — and the business — a clear view of what's happening in real time. Security, Compliance & Risk Management: Build and maintain a robust incident response capability, with clear runbooks, defined escalation paths, and a blameless post-mortem culture that turns failures into organisational learning. Embed security into the engineering lifecycle from design through deployment — shift-left security practices, threat modelling, dependency scanning, and penetration testing as standard parts of how we build. Own engineering's relationship with regulatory bodies, external auditors, and security reviewers across all operating jurisdictions — ensuring we are always audit-ready and never scrambling. Mandatory Requirements: & Qualifications Leadership Track Record — Non-Negotiable: Proven experience: scaling engineering organisations through periods of rapid growth: hiring, structuring, levelling, and retaining high-performing engineers and engineering managers. 10+ years in software engineering with at least 4–5 years in senior engineering leadership (VP, Director, or Head of Engineering level), managing teams of 20+ engineers across multiple product lines (is a plus). Demonstrable, metrics-backed evidence of engineering team performance — delivery throughput, uptime improvements, or equivalent. You should be able to walk into this interview with numbers. A track record of successfully delivering complex, high-stakes software products — on time, to quality, in regulated or high-reliability environments. Fintech & Cross-Border Systems Experience: Direct experience: building or scaling financial technology products — payments infrastructure, cross-border remittance, multi-currency systems, digital banking, or enterprise financial software. Deep familiarity with the regulatory landscape for global fintech: PCI-DSS, SOC 2, open banking frameworks, AML/KYC requirements, and the compliance demands of operating across multiple jurisdictions. Experience: working with payment rails — i.e. local real-time payment networks — and the technical complexity of building reliable, low-latency, high-integrity financial transaction systems. Understanding of African fintech market dynamics is a strong advantage: mobile money ecosystems, central bank API standards, and the infrastructure realities of emerging market financial systems. Technical Depth: Strong architectural command across modern software stacks — cloud-native distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architectures, and API-first design. Experience: designing and scaling high-availability, high-throughput systems with strict data integrity requirements: — the kind where failure has real financial consequences. Practical experience: implementing AI/ML capabilities in production — whether integrating LLMs, deploying ML models, or embedding AI tooling into engineering workflows. Hands-on experience: with major cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) at scale, including container orchestration (Kubernetes), and modern observability stacks. Executive & Communication Capabilities: Strong written communication — you write clearly, set context well, and produce documentation, architecture decision records, and engineering strategy papers that people actually read. Board and C-suite fluency: you can translate complex technical strategy into clear business language without losing the substance, and hold your own in executive-level planning and investment conversations. Key Performance Indicators The following KPIs are examples which will be reviewed at agreed intervals with the CTO and executive leadership. Success in this role will be measured against clear, quantifiable outcomes. KPI Metric Target / Benchmark Review Cadence Deployment Frequency Multiple deploys per day per team Monthly Lead Time for Changes < 1 day (elite tier) Monthly Change Failure Rate < 5% of production releases Monthly Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) < 1 hour for P1 incidents Monthly System Uptime / Availability ≥ 99.95% across all production systems Monthly Engineering Headcount Growth Hiring plan met ± 10%, < 90-day time-to-fill Quarterly Engineer Retention Rate ≥ 90% annual retention of senior engineers Quarterly AI Tool Adoption Rate ≥ 80% of engineers actively using AI dev tools Quarterly Sprint / Delivery Predictability ≥ 85% of committed scope delivered per cycle Quarterly Security & Compliance Posture Zero critical open vulnerabilities > 30 days; audit-ready at all times Quarterly Technical Debt Ratio Tracked and declining quarter-on-quarter Quarterly Engineering OKR Achievement ≥ 70% of Engineering OKRs met or exceeded Quarterly How to Appyly Interested and qualified candidates should send their CV to: career@zojatech.com using the Job Title as the subject of the email. Application Deadline: 23rd September, 2026. View all Jobs in Nigeria Lagos State Head of Engineering job vacancies in Nigeria