Chief Technology Officer
REMOTE /
New York, New York, USA
- Permanent
This job allows you to work remotely
Job Description
Our client is hiring their first Chief Technology Officer. This is a leadership role, not a hands-on-keyboard one. The CTO will own the entire engineering organization: product engineering, platform and infrastructure, security, and reliability, for a platform that moves money for sophisticated financial institutions.
The engineering team today is roughly 100 people and growing fast. It was built by founders who stayed close to the code, and the mandate now is to take it through the scaling transition: build out the management layer, install a real hiring engine, raise the operational bar, and give the founders some leverage back, all while keeping the shipping cadence that got the company here.
Just as central to the role is AI transformation, on two fronts. On the product side, that means embedding AI into the client's products, from intelligent document and invoice processing to spend intelligence and agentic workflows. Inside engineering, it means making AI-assisted development a real, durable productivity gain rather than a side experiment. Our client wants someone who has already led this kind of shift somewhere real, not just talked about it.
The CTO reports directly to the Co-Founder and acts as a genuine thought partner to the founding team on product strategy, commercial commitments, and company direction.
What the CTO Will Own
- Scaling the organization. Designing and building the engineering org for its next stage, including team structure, a management layer, career paths, and a working operating rhythm.
- The hiring engine. Building the recruiting system itself: pipeline, assessment standards, and an employer story that can attract senior engineers to a company they may not know yet.
- Delivery and reliability. Owning both the pace and the quality of execution across the platform, shipping at startup speed while meeting the security, uptime, and auditability bar financial institutions expect.
- AI transformation, across product and organization. Setting and driving the AI roadmap for the client's products (document intelligence, spend analytics, agentic workflows) and pushing AI adoption inside engineering itself, with the governance a payments platform requires.
- Technical judgment, exercised through others. Setting architecture direction and catching risk early without writing the code personally, through architecture reviews, incident reviews, and staying genuinely close to the ground truth.
- Security and trust. Championing the security posture and compliance readiness that hedge funds, private equity firms, and family offices expect when real money moves through the platform.
- Management partnership. Translating between business and technology in both directions, shaping the roadmap with commercial reality in mind, and giving the co-founders an honest, current read on engineering capacity and risk.
What Our Client Is Looking For
- A proven scaling track record. Someone who has actually taken an engineering org through the messy middle, growing a strained, fast-moving team into a structured one, rather than someone who inherited a large team that was already well resourced. This is the single most important qualification.
- Breadth beyond one specialty. Full engineering scope, meaning application and product engineering, infrastructure, security, and reliability, not just one layer of the stack.
- A real AI transformation leader. Someone who has led an AI transformation across both product and organization, shipped AI capabilities that clients actually use, and changed how an engineering team builds software with AI. They should be able to tell the difference between durable AI advantage and a good demo, and know how to do this responsibly in a regulated, money-moving environment.
- A builder of hiring systems. Someone who has personally built hiring pipelines and talent brands rather than relying on a big company's existing recruiting machine.
- Leadership through others. Someone who develops managers, delegates real ownership, retains senior talent, and holds a high bar, while still earning engineers' respect without stepping back into the lead engineer role themselves.
- Technical credibility. Deep enough technical grounding that senior engineers trust their judgment, even though they won't be writing production code day to day.
- Business fluency. Comfortable operating with a commercial lens, including pricing, client commitments, and partnerships.
- Experience in fintech, payments, or financial services infrastructure is a strong plus, and experience serving institutional or capital-markets clients is even more so.
Technology Environment
The platform runs on C#, Python, and Angular with Azure SQL, deployed on Microsoft Azure with Azure DevOps. Our client is pragmatic about technology and evolves the stack deliberately as it scales.
Why This Role
This is a chance to be the first CTO of a proven fintech with 140+ institutional clients and real momentum already behind it. The org-building work is there to be done, on a foundation that already works.
It's also a rare kind of product surface: workflow software expanding into payments, data, and AI, with proprietary spend data that makes the AI opportunity real rather than aspirational.
The founders have deep domain credibility and are looking for a genuine partner, not a caretaker.
The role is remote-friendly within the U.S., with travel expected for leadership and client engagement as needed.
Must Have Skills:
- 12+ years in software engineering with at least 4–5 years in a CTO, VP Engineering, or Head of Engineering capacity at a B2B SaaS company
- Demonstrated, first-hand experience scaling an engineering organization through a comparable growth stage (~20–40 to ~100 engineers)
- Full-scope engineering ownership in a prior role: product/application engineering, platform and infrastructure, security, and reliability — not a single layer (e.g. not infrastructure-only or product-only)
- Direct, hands-on involvement in architecture and code-level decisions in a current or recent role — able to sit in architecture reviews and peer reviews and hold technical credibility with senior engineers, without relying solely on reports to translate technical detail
- A track record of personally building or substantially owning a technical hiring pipeline and employer/talent brand — able to speak to specific channels, interview process design, and closing strategy used
- Direct leadership of an AI transformation with shipped, client-adopted outcomes., you should be able to name specific capabilities delivered (not pilots or internal demos) and specific, measurable changes to how the engineering team builds software with AI (e.g. agentic development workflows, AI-assisted CI/CD, agent-authored code with human review gates)
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
Nice to Have Skills:
Experience in fintech, payments, or financial services infrastructure
Experience serving institutional or capital-markets clients (hedge funds, PE firms, family offices)
Familiarity with a stack including C#, Python, Angular, Azure SQL, Microsoft Azure, and Azure DevOps
Security posture and compliance readiness for regulated, money-moving platforms