Chief Technology Officer

CTO — Chief Technology Officer

Location: New York City, NY

Work Arrangement: Onsite

Employment Type: Full-Time

Experience: 5–8 Years

About the Role

We are looking for an exceptional, hands-on Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to lead our technology strategy, engineering organization, and product development.

This is an ideal opportunity for a technically strong leader who has experience building products, leading engineering teams, and making high-impact architectural decisions in a fast-moving startup or high-growth environment.

The ideal candidate is both a technical leader and a builder —someone who can define the vision, make critical engineering decisions, and still dive into the code and architecture when needed.

What You’ll Do

• Define and own the company's technology vision, strategy, and long-term technical roadmap .
• Lead the architecture, development, deployment, and scaling of the company's technology platform.
• Build and lead a high-performing engineering organization.
• Establish engineering standards, development processes, and technical best practices.
• Make critical decisions around architecture, infrastructure, security, scalability, and technology investments.
• Work closely with the CEO, founders, product, and business teams to translate company objectives into technical strategy.
• Lead the development of scalable, reliable, and secure production systems.
• Remain hands-on with architecture, code reviews, technical design, and critical engineering problems.
• Hire, mentor, and retain exceptional engineering talent.
• Build a culture of ownership, speed, experimentation, and engineering excellence .
• Identify technical risks and establish strategies to address them proactively.
• Oversee cloud infrastructure, DevOps, security, observability, and production reliability.
• Evaluate new technologies, frameworks, and AI capabilities and determine where they can create meaningful business value.
• Establish metrics and processes for engineering productivity, system reliability, and product quality.
• Represent the company's technical vision to customers, partners, investors, and other external stakeholders when needed.

Required Qualifications

• 5–8 years of professional software engineering experience , with significant experience in backend, systems, or platform engineering.
• Previous experience leading engineering teams, technical projects, or a technology organization.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and hands-on development experience.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, system architecture, databases, APIs, cloud infrastructure, and scalability .
• Experience designing and operating production systems at scale.
• Strong proficiency in at least one modern programming language such as Python, Go, Java, C++, or Node.js .
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure .
• Experience with modern infrastructure, CI/CD, containers, monitoring, and observability.
• Strong product mindset and ability to connect technical decisions to business outcomes.
• Proven ability to operate in an ambiguous, fast-moving environment.
• Excellent leadership, communication, hiring, and mentoring skills.
• Ability to work onsite in New York City

Strongly Preferred

• Experience as a CTO, founding engineer, technical co-founder, VP/Head of Engineering, or equivalent technical leadership role.
• Startup or early-stage company experience.
• Experience taking a product from 0 → 1 and subsequently scaling it.
• Experience building and managing engineering teams.
• Experience with AI/ML, LLMs, generative AI, voice AI, or AI-powered products .
• Experience with Kubernetes, Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL, microservices, event-driven architectures, and distributed systems.
• Experience establishing engineering organizations and technical processes from the ground up.
• Experience working directly with founders, investors, customers, or enterprise partners.
• Strong technical portfolio, open-source contributions, or demonstrated history of building successful products.

Leadership Expectations

The CTO will be expected to balance technical depth with business leadership .

You should be comfortable moving between high-level strategy and low-level technical discussions—whether that means defining the company's architecture, reviewing a critical system design, interviewing an engineering candidate, or helping debug a production issue.

We are looking for someone who:

• Thinks like an owner.
• Moves quickly without compromising critical engineering standards.
• Can build and execute a technical roadmap.
• Attracts and develops exceptional engineers.
• Makes pragmatic decisions under uncertainty.
• Is highly hands-on and technically credible.
• Understands both technology and product .
• Can turn ambitious ideas into scalable, production-ready systems.

Why This Role

This is a rare opportunity for a technically exceptional leader to have significant ownership over the company's technology and product direction .

You will work directly with leadership, shape the engineering organization, make foundational architectural decisions, and have a direct impact on the company's growth.

This is a full-time, onsite CTO position based in New York City.