Chief Technology Officer

About OneDayOnly is a fast-paced, high-volume e-commerce business at the forefront of daily deals and flash sales in South Africa. We delight millions of customers with compelling offers, and we're now entering an era of scaled innovation. This role is critical to unlocking the next wave of customer experience, data sophistication, and platform growth. CTO Vision After 15 years of strong growth, we're at a pivotal moment. Our business was built on grit, sharp execution, and home-grown systems—but the next chapter demands more. As our roadmap grows more complex and our ambitions more bold, we're looking for a CTO who can help us scale into the future. We need a system strategist who can assess our legacy tech, lead us toward a modern, AI-first architecture, and build the structures, tools, and teams that power innovation. A leader who thrives at the intersection of "code" and "commerce," who can drive speed, resilience, and growth, and who plays a strategic role across the entire business—not just tech. We've built something special—a uniquely South African platform that created its own market for deal-based savings. We have a fantastic development team who continue to achieve great things. But the space is shifting. New players are entering with agility, playfulness, and scale. To stay ahead, we need to evolve faster, think bolder, and lead smarter. This role isn't only about keeping things running — it's about reimagining what comes next. Who you are We're seeking a visionary, hands-on CTO who will architect our future. This is not a maintenance role - this is for someone who thinks like a founder, codes like a craftsman, and builds like a systems engineer. Your job is to define and deliver a technology strategy that sets our e-commerce business up for a decade of scale, speed, and intelligence. You're a builder, strategist, and coach. You think in systems. You thrive under pressure and are as comfortable debugging an issue as you are whiteboarding the next month tech roadmap. You're ready to make a measurable impact and love driving innovation, speed, and reliability through technology. A strategic thinker with deep technical expertise and strong commercial acumen comfortable operating across board-level strategy and hands-on technical leadership. Driven by innovation, optimisation, and creating measurable business impact. Adept at building and mentoring high-performing, multidisciplinary teams. Excited by scale, complexity, and transformation in a fast-moving e-commerce environment. Responsibilities Define and own the long-term technical strategy and system architecture. Rebuild or replatform legacy systems into scalable, modular, API-first architectures. Lead front-end, back-end, and data platform direction with modern stacks and tooling. Partner with the Directors and potentially serve on the board as a technology advisor and visionary. Mentor the Head of Development and establish clear development processes, engineering culture, and performance expectations. Drive innovation — from AI personalisation to big data platforms — to serve customer experience and business insights. Make build vs buy vs partner decisions with commercial ROI in mind. What You'll Do Technology & Platform Strategy Define and execute a modern, AI-first technical strategy that scales with growth and enhances the customer experience. Assess and re-architect systems for modular, API-first scalability while managing risk and technical debt. Lead front-end, back-end, data, and DevOps teams—ensuring performance, security, and rapid iteration. Customer & Commerce Experience Set the strategic direction for all user-facing systems, ensuring a fast, beautiful, and consistent UI across mobile and desktop. Drive UX / UI initiatives and align with product and design teams. Implement features like intelligent search, recommendation engines, and personalisation. Champion a culture of experimentation (A/B testing, conversion funnel optimisation). Infrastructure, Security & Scalability Architect scalable, secure back-end services for high transaction volumes. Oversee all cloud, server, and deployment strategies for performance and reliability. Lead DevOps best practices to enable rapid deployment and rollback. Integrate robust fintech and third-party systems including ERP, WMS, CRM, and