Aerospike has built technology that performs where conventional data architectures reach their limits. The next stage of the company's growth requires more than continued technical innovation. It requires the ability to translate that innovation into an enterprise architecture that customers can understand, adopt, operate, and expand-and into a market narrative that makes Aerospike's strategic relevance unmistakable.
The Global Field CTO will stand at that intersection. This leader will work with senior customer executives, enterprise architects, developers, partners, and Aerospike's own leadership team to connect emerging market requirements with the company's differentiated capabilities. The role will help customers understand what Aerospike makes possible while ensuring that the company remains grounded in the operational reality of the enterprises it serves.
What You Will LeadStrategic Customer Engagement- Serve as a trusted technical and strategic advisor to the most consequential customers and prospects, engaging credibly with CIOs, CTOs, chief architects, data and AI leaders, and senior engineering executives.
- Help customers define the architecture required for mission-critical real-time applications, production AI systems, and data-intensive workloads where performance, reliability, scale, and cost determine business outcomes.
- Build durable executive and architectural relationships that extend beyond an individual transaction and create the foundation for long-term platform adoption and expansion.
- Establish a disciplined design-partner model for strategic customers, with clear hypotheses, architectural boundaries, success criteria, and tests for repeatability.
Data and AI Market Narrative- Partner with the CEO, Chief Technology & Product Officer, and marketing leadership to shape and continuously sharpen Aerospike's enterprise Data and AI infrastructure narrative.
- Translate complex architectural advantage into language that is technically rigorous, economically grounded, and relevant to the initiatives enterprise executives already fund.
- Represent Aerospike externally through executive briefings, industry events, analyst conversations, technical forums, written thought leadership, and strategic ecosystem engagements.
- Help the market understand Aerospike's role in operational AI: the systems that must preserve real-time state and context, support dependable decisions, and execute at enterprise scale around the model.
Product Strategy and Field Intelligence- Create a structured mechanism for converting customer, competitive, workload, and ecosystem intelligence into actionable input for product strategy and roadmap decisions.
- Work in formal partnership with the Chief Technology & Product Officer and product leadership while respecting clear product and architectural decision rights.
- Identify recurring adoption barriers across evaluation, deployment, migration, cloud operations, developer experience, observability, packaging, and integration-and help distinguish strategic product requirements from bespoke requests.
- Bring disconfirming evidence forward early. The role is responsible for improving enterprise truth, not merely reinforcing the company's current beliefs.
Complex Opportunity Leadership- Lead the technical and architectural strategy for selected high-value, technically complex opportunities in partnership with sales, solutions architecture, product, engineering, and customer success.
- Help account teams establish the customer's architectural and economic reasons to change, define differentiated evaluation criteria, and connect Aerospike to measurable enterprise outcomes.
- Engage directly when executive sponsorship, architectural authority, competitive reframing, or cross-functional orchestration is required to advance an opportunity.
- Develop repeatable patterns from strategic wins so that individual field insight becomes institutional capability across the revenue organization.
Partner and Hyperscaler Strategy- Build senior technical relationships with hyperscalers, global systems integrators, technology partners, and influential ecosystem participants.
- Identify joint architectural patterns, solution propositions, field motions, and market opportunities that expand Aerospike's relevance and reach.
- Work with business development and partner leadership to ensure that technical alliances produce customer adoption and commercial consequence rather than remaining symbolic integrations.
Technical Field Leadership- Raise the technical and executive effectiveness of the field through architecture patterns, competitive insight, customer proof, executive messaging, and selective coaching.
- Create alignment across the Global Field CTO, solutions architecture, sales engineering, product, marketing, and engineering communities without assuming direct management responsibility for those organizations.
- Model a standard of technical honesty: distinguish proven capability from roadmap intent, articulate tradeoffs clearly, and never allow advocacy to run ahead of evidence.
How the Role OperatesThe Global Field CTO reports to the Chief Revenue Officer because the role's daily accountability is created in the market: strategic customer engagement, opportunity leadership, ecosystem development, and measurable commercial influence.
The Global Field CTO will operate in close partnership with the Chief Technology & Product Officer. That partnership is essential, but the decision rights must remain clear: the Field CTO brings structured customer and market truth into the product system; the Chief Technology & Product Officer retains accountability for product strategy, architecture, roadmap, and technical execution.
WHAT THIS ROLE IS NOTThis is not the head of sales engineering, an overlay attached to every transaction, an alternative product organization, or a corporate evangelist measured primarily by visibility. It is an executive individual-contributor role whose influence must be visible in strategic customers, market clarity, product intelligence, partner leverage, and enterprise growth.
What Success Looks Like- Aerospike is represented consistently and credibly with the technical and executive leaders of its most important customers, prospects, and partners.
- Strategic opportunities have stronger architectural sponsorship, clearer differentiation, better evaluation criteria, and greater executive alignment.
- The company's Data and AI narrative becomes more precise, more differentiated, and more deeply connected to production enterprise reality.
- Product and engineering leaders receive structured, prioritized field intelligence rather than fragmented anecdotes or escalations.
- Strategic customer insights and wins are converted into repeatable architectures, use cases, proof points, and field capabilities.
- Hyperscaler and ecosystem relationships produce tangible technical and commercial outcomes.
- The role earns trust across revenue, product, engineering, marketing, and customer leadership because it improves decisions rather than competing for ownership.
The Leadership ProfileThe strongest candidate will combine two forms of credibility that are rarely found in one person. This leader will understand the enterprise from the customer side-as a former Field CTO, chief architect, senior enterprise technology leader, or trusted advisor to those roles-while also understanding how a technology company turns differentiated architecture into product adoption, strategic revenue, and a coherent market position.
Required Experience and Capabilities- Significant executive-level experience in databases, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, data platforms, AI/ML infrastructure, or another technically demanding enterprise infrastructure category.
- Demonstrated ability to advise CIOs, CTOs, chief architects, data and AI executives, and engineering leaders on consequential enterprise architecture decisions.
- Deep understanding of production data systems, including performance, latency, distributed consistency, scale, resilience, security, operability, cloud economics, and total cost of ownership.
- Credible understanding of modern AI architectures and the data, state, context, retrieval, decisioning, governance, and execution requirements surrounding production AI systems.
- A record of influencing product direction through disciplined customer and market evidence while maintaining respect for product and engineering accountability.
- Experience shaping and advancing technically complex enterprise opportunities, including competitive evaluations, executive alignment, partner participation, and architectural validation.
- Executive presence and communication range: equally capable in a boardroom, an architecture review, a customer workshop, an analyst conversation, or a public technical forum.
- Experience building meaningful relationships with hyperscalers, systems integrators, technology partners, or other participants in the enterprise data and AI ecosystem.
Leadership Characteristics- Architectural depth without technical arrogance.
- Commercial judgment without sacrificing technical truth.
- Intellectual curiosity and the willingness to change a position when the evidence changes.
- The ability to influence across functions without relying on organizational authority.
- Strong judgment about when to engage deeply, when to create a repeatable pattern, and when to decline work that would create bespoke product drift.
- A bias toward clarity, accountability, and measurable enterprise outcomes.
- The maturity to represent Aerospike with demanding customers and partners while operating as a trusted member of the executive leadership system.
Why AerospikeThe most important infrastructure companies are built when an exceptional technical capability meets an architectural change the market can no longer ignore. Aerospike already powers mission-critical systems where milliseconds matter and failure is not an acceptable operating condition. The opportunity now is to build upon that foundation as enterprise Data and AI architectures are being reconsidered for a world of continuous intelligence, real-time context, and autonomous action.
The Global Field CTO will have an unusual opportunity to help define that future from the intersection of technology, customers, product, partners, and the market-and to ensure that Aerospike's technical distinction becomes enduring customer and enterprise value.
Location and TravelThis is a location-flexible executive role. The Global Field CTO will travel as business needs require to engage customers, partners, industry participants, and Aerospike teams globally.
Equal OpportunityAerospike is committed to creating an environment in which people can do their best work and contribute from their full range of experiences and perspectives. Aerospike is an equal opportunity employer and considers qualified applicants without regard to legally protected characteristics. Reasonable accommodations are available throughout the recruiting process in accordance with applicable law.
Salary Range: $300,000 - $380,000
(Actual compensation will be based on experience, location, and other relevant factors.)
Aerospike is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to an environment free from discrimination based on race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, or veteran status.
To keep our recruitment pipeline as high-performance as our database, Aerospike uses AI-driven tools to streamline resume reviews, scheduling, and communication. While we love smart tech, we value human connection even more. AI helps us optimize the process, but real people make 100% of the actual hiring decisions.
Aerospike is the real-time database for mission-critical use cases and workloads, including machine learning, generative, and agentic AI. Aerospike powers millions of transactions per second with millisecond latency, at a fraction of the total cost of ownership compared to other databases.
Global leaders, including Adobe, Airtel, Barclays, Criteo, DBS Bank, Experian, Grab, HDFC Bank, PayPal, Sony Interactive Entertainment, The Trade Desk, and Wayfair, rely on Aerospike for customer 360, fraud detection, real-time bidding, profile stores, recommendation engines, and other use cases.
At Aerospike, we dream big and deliver even bigger. Our mission is to
unleash the power of the world's real-time data with a database built for
infinite scale, speed, and sustainability.
If you're ready to shape the future of data, join us.
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