Chief Technology Officer

TITLE: CTO/ Chief Technology Officer
LOCATION CHOICES: #1 NYC, NY #2 Dallas, TX
IN OFFICE POLICY IF LOCAL: Hybrid terms to be discussed. Remote-friendly within the U.S., with travel for leadership and client engagement as needed (for the right candidate).
SALARY: DOE (open for discussion)
TOTAL COMP: To be discussed. Salary, bonus and options
HIERARCHY: Report to CEO
SIZES OF STAFF TO MANAGE: none at first, but proven experience mentoring and building a development team
INDUSTRY: Fintech, Banking, Financial Services Platforms, Start-ups
PRIVATE COMPANY
# of EMPLOYEES: <200 and growing
EDUCATION/ DEGREES/ CERTIFICATIONS REQUIRED: Bachelors+

WHAT IS IMPORTANT TO THE CEO
Engineering leadership: restructure the org team (if assessed and needed); use AI to make more efficient
Accomplish in the 1st 6 months to a year: Org Alignment on the engineering team
Size of Company History: Person who has scaled an organization and is very hands on technically. Even though not a startup, this company works together as a team
The Right Fit: Somebody who has grown an organization past 300. Need somebody with strong/ proven leadership skills, but not completely hands-off. Still technical, but not too technical that you don t have enough leadership skills.

WHY THIS ROLE
Be the first CTO of a proven fintech with 140+ institutional clients and real momentum - the org-building is yours to do, on a foundation that already works.
A rare product surface: workflow software expanding into payments, data, and Al, in an underserved corner of financial services - with proprietary spend data that makes the Al opportunity real, not aspirational.
Founders with deep domain credibility who want a genuine partner, not a caretaker.

THE OPPORTUNITY
This is an exciting opportunity to be our client s first Chief Technology Officer. This is a leadership role, not a hands-on-keyboard role:
You will own the entire engineering organization - product engineering, platform and infrastructure, security, and reliability - for a platform that moves money for sophisticated financial institutions.
Today the engineering team is roughly 100 people and growing fast. It has been built by founders who stayed close to the code.

Your mandate is to take it through the scaling transition:
Build the management layer, install the hiring engine, raise the operational bar, and give the founders leverage - while keeping the shipping cadence that got us here.
Equally central to the mandate is Al transformation - on both fronts.

In the product:
Embedding Al into company products, from intelligent document and invoice processing to spend intelligence and agentic workflows.

In the organization:
Making Al-assisted development a durable productivity advantage across the engineering team, not a side experiment.

We want a CTO who has already successfully led this shift in other companies and is looking for a great new company to help build.
You will report directly to the CEO and operate as a true thought partner to the founding team on product strategy, commercial commitments, and company direction.

WHAT YOU WILL OWN
Scaling the organization. Design and build the engineering org for the next stage - team structure, management layer, career paths, and operating rhythm.
The hiring engine. Build the recruiting system itself: pipeline, assessment standards, and an employer story that attracts senior engineers to a company they may not yet know.
Delivery and reliability. Own both the pace and the quality of execution across the platform - shipping at startup cadence with the security, uptime, and auditability financial institutions demand.
Al transformation - product and organization. Set and execute the Al roadmap across our products (document intelligence, spend analytics, agentic workflows) and drive Al adoption inside engineering- tooling, standards, and measurable productivity gains - with the governance a payments platform requires.
Technical judgment through others. Set architecture direction and catch risk early without writing the code yourself- through architecture reviews, incident reviews, and staying close to the ground truth.
Security and trust. Champion the security posture and compliance readiness expected by hedge funds, private equity firms, and family offices moving real money on our rails.
Management partnership. Translate between business and technology in both directions: shape the roadmap with commercial reality in mind, and give the Co-founders an honest, current view of engineering capacity and risk.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR
A proven scaling track record. You have taken an engineering organization through the messy middle - growing a strained, fast-moving team into a structured org - not merely inherited a large, well-resourced one. This is the single most important qualification.
Breadth beyond one specialty. You have owned full engineering scope - application and product engineering, infrastructure, security, and reliability - not just one layer of the stack.
An Al transformation leader. You have led an Al transformation of both product and organization - shipped Al-powered capabilities that clients actually use and changed how an engineering team builds software with Al. You can distinguish durable Al advantage from demos, and you know how to do this safely in a regulated, money-moving context.
A builder of hiring systems. You have personally constructed hiring pipelines and talent brands, rather than relying on a large company's recruiting machinery.
Leadership through others. You develop managers, delegate real ownership, retain senior talent, and hold a high-performance bar- and you earn engineers' respect without re-inserting yourself as lead engineer.
Technical credibility. Deep enough technical grounding that senior engineers trust your judgment, even though you will not be writing production code.
Business fluency. Comfort operating with a commercial lens - pricing, client commitments, partnerships - and communicating with financially sophisticated clients and partners.
Experience in fintech, payments, or financial services infrastructure is a strong plus; 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: we optimize for what the team can execute and evolve the stack deliberately as we scale. You should be opinionated about engineering excellence and unreligious about tools.