Chief Technology Officer
Own engineering architecture, hiring, and reliability across ForLab+ at national scale and Link entering production. Shape Opian's technical strategy as a 15-person team expanding across Sub-Saharan Africa.
About the role
You'll lead the technical direction of two products used daily by health workers and planners across East Africa. ForLab+ is Opian's core forecasting system, now running in Ethiopia and preparing for three new countries; Link is a clinical decision support system entering GA across hospital networks. Both need reliable, secure systems that health workers trust at 6am before an expiry audit.
The role sits at the intersection of product, ops, and engineering culture. You'll set standards for code review, incident response, on-call rotations, and security. You'll hire and grow a team of senior engineers, balancing recruiting with shipping.
You'll work closely with the CEO on roadmap prioritization, the Head of Data on data quality and inference pipelines, and the VP Delivery on deployment reliability across countries. Most work is quiet — we prefer shipping over process theatre.
What you will own
- Architecture decisions across both products: tech stack choices, database schema, API contracts, deployment infrastructure
- Engineering hiring and onboarding — recruiting and ramping 4+ senior engineers in year one
- On-call rotations, incident review practices, and post-mortems that make the team learn without blame
- Code review standards, testing discipline, and deployment automation
- Security practices: secret rotation, access control, data handling across countries with different regulations
Year one goals
- Scale ForLab+ to three new countries (Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda) with <2% unplanned downtime
- Achieve Link GA status across 10+ hospital deployments with product stability and security audit readiness
- Hire 4 senior engineers and establish a readable onboarding path for the next cohort
- Institute on-call practice: <30min MTTR for P1s, weekly incident review with blameless culture
What we are looking for
- 10+ years building software, with 5+ years in technical leadership of teams 15+
- Shipped systems at scale: health tech, fintech, logistics, or similar where downtime matters. You know what it means to support a product in production.
- Comfortable with the Addis Ababa-first, remote-compatible working pattern. You visit Addis regularly for alignment and hiring.
- Deep care about health systems. You can explain why a 0.3% improvement in forecasting accuracy matters to a Ministry.
- Bias toward pragmatism: you ship before it's perfect, then iterate. You know the difference between technical debt and healthy shortcuts.
How we interview
Initial call
A 30-minute conversation with someone from the team — usually the role's direct manager. We talk about your background, what you're looking for, and why Opian. We're looking for genuine interest in health systems and a communication style that works for us.
Craft interview or case
Depending on the role, this might be a take-home assignment (CTO candidates do a system design; data candidates might analyze a dataset) or a live conversation around a case study from our work. We're not testing trivia — we want to see how you think through ambiguity.
Team conversations
You'll talk with 2-3 people you'd work closely with: the CTO, Head of Data, or VP Delivery. These are working conversations, not interrogations. We talk about how we ship, how we disagree, how we debug.
Offer
If we're both excited, we make an offer. Compensation is competitive, commensurate with experience, plus meaningful equity and relocation support where relevant.
About Opian
Opian builds decision systems for health supply chains and clinical care. ForLab+ helps countries forecast drug, vaccine, and test demand across thousands of facilities. Link is a clinical decision support system for hospitals. Both are deployed at national scale in Ethiopia and expanding across Sub-Saharan Africa.
We're a 15-person team based in Addis Ababa. We're funded by the Gates Foundation. We move quietly and ship. We believe in writing things down, talking to users, and making decisions with authors, not committees.
More about Opian