Position overview
As a board member and part of the Senior Leadership Team, the CTO collaborates closely with the CEO and COO to establish a cohesive strategic direction that yields results for short-term growth objectives while working towards the long-term goal of a company exit.
The successful performance of this role directly impact key areas of the business, including operations, client success, member engagement, platform functionality, user experience (UX), business intelligence (BI) reporting, B2B and B2C payments, transactional communications, online security, cloud infrastructure, data architecture, event tracking, third-party integrations, and product development.
Focus areas – delivery
- Strive to maintain a >12-month uptime record.
- Utilise tools like Sentry, Snyk, and Hotjar to monitor and uphold application, security, and usability standards.
- Place a strong emphasis on security, considering the handling and storage of hundreds of thousands of user records, as well as their associated profiles, surveys, and activities.
- Conduct regular testing and research to keep back-end and front-end frameworks up-to-date and aligned with modern web best practices.
- Give priority to regular testing of DNS and SSL configurations.
- Stay informed about cloud architecture opportunities and threats, while maintaining and upgrading production environments to deliver cost-effective and highly-competitive standards.
- Test and maintain a suite of in-house reporting solutions, ensuring optimal back-end performance and front-end usability, while adapting to the needs of the CEO and COO.
- Monitor and maintain our in-house Control system, adding features when possible to empower the team.
- Monitor and enhance core API performance by refining existing solutions and developing new in-house approaches.
- Safeguard continuity and develop use cases for a growing data warehousing strategy that encompasses approximately 100 million real-world activity and company growth records from the past three years.
- Ensure financial operations functionality and efficiency while addressing any issues with digital payments made by clients through Stripe and GoCardless integrations.
- Maintain the reliability of ongoing integrations with both the open banking payment solution and digital gift card issuance provider, while adapting to disruptions in merchant services and managing internal cash flow and float management solutions.
- Regularly verify data reliability and alignment across capture and storage solutions critical to member, client, and operational system functionality and reporting.
- Collaborate with the partnerships team to ensure the successful creation and delivery of member email communications twice a week.
- Cultivate and maintain ESP strategies, considering deliverability and balancing influencing factors across all company email activities.
- Provide support, assistance, and advice to the team as needed, identifying areas where technical solutions can help to accomplish collective goals more effectively.
- Stay up-to-date with internal data affairs to detect anomalies and remain equipped with relevant insights to share.
- Offer tailored assistance to sales and client success as the technical point of contact during calls or emails.
- Maintain relationships with clients who require a technical point of contact within the business, addressing their needs accordingly.
- Keep the Information Security Policy and Employee Digital Use Policy up-to-date, ensuring all team members read and sign them annually.
Focus areas – product development
- Translate key objective drivers and pressing business needs into feature deliverables or
enhancements in the product roadmap, strictly guided by SLT output and real-world departmental experiences. - Collaborate with the COO to own the buy-in procedure, demonstrating the importance of transparency, team input, collective ambitions, and shared needs, supported by tangible results.
- Develop methods for projecting ROI and OKR impact figures to guide the ongoing prioritisation of items in the roadmap.
- Conduct research and design technical specifications before working as part of the development team to release roadmap items as efficiently as possible.
- Maintain clear and effective communication of development progress with the team.
Focus areas – data
- Lead initiatives that fuel a data-driven organisation and maintain an accessible capture, storage, and visualisation environment.
- Inspire a data-first mindset within the team by implementing solutions that have regular and meaningful impacts on day-to-day workflows.
- Support and address the data needs of the COO and CEO while refining the system to meet their specific requirements.
- Design schema models with AI in mind to future-proof and secure long-term value in data.
- Allocate a dedicated day every month for data exploration and visualisation tests.
- Provide assistance where needed to improve or troubleshoot the reporting outputs and
configurations of third-party tools like HubSpot. - Monitor and maintain survey functionality, prioritised question lists, and ~400k member answers.
General requirements
- Makes use of strong problem-solving and analytical skills to effectively address complex technical and business challenges.
- Experienced in owning all stages when designing and delivering business-critical solutions.
- Has a proven track record of successfully delivering projects on time and within budget.
- Comfortable challenging established methods to overcome constraints and obstacles and able to adapt and thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic startup environment.
- Exhibits a high-level grasp and keen intuition for business fundamentals, supported by a proven history of tackling commercial and operational problems with multi-faceted technical solutions.
- Can communicate the complex logic and functional reasoning behind technical decisions effectively to non-technical stakeholders.
- Confident with contributing ideas and knowledge that add value and provide direction in strategy meetings.
- Operates comfortably in high-pressure environments while maintaining clarity of focus on delivering value.
- Has a continuous learning mindset with a need for staying updated with the industry trends, technologies, and best practices.
Technical requirements
- Possesses total proficiency in both front-end and back-end design and delivery.
- Has a deep understanding of the full-stack lifecycle and its connected environments.
- Proficient in implementing and managing scalable and secure SAAS platform architectures.
- Familiar with DevOps practices, including continuous integration, continuous delivery, and infrastructure automation.
- Experienced with data engineering and ETL processes, including data extraction, transformation, and loading.
- Can demonstrate knowledge of performance optimization techniques for web applications, including caching mechanisms and content delivery networks.
- Has any level of experience and an active personal interest in conceptualising and building functional ML models for use with large datasets.
- Has a natural ability and passion for understanding, organising, explaining, and visually framing key insights and driving forces within BI datasets.
- Willing to write and maintain code as part of day-to-day activities.
- Has a solid understanding of ESPs and successful experience in managing email deliverability.
- A minimum of 5 years of experience in full-stack system design, implementation, and maintenance.
- Knows containerisation technologies like Docker and orchestration platforms like Kubernetes.
- Demonstrated, for at least 5 years, a confident understanding and hands-on ability with:
○ Linux, bash, curl & Git;
○ MySQL & BigQuery;
○ PHP & Laravel;
○ any bespoke, high-performance API environments;
○ JavaScript, CSS & HTML (web & email). - A minimum of 3 years of hands-on experience with:
○ NuxtJS, VueJS & React;
○ DataStudio (LookerStudio) & ChartJS;
○ any issue tracking system;
○ GCP Compute Engine, GCP App Engine, GCP Cloud Functions. - A minimum of 3 years of experience in creating, segmenting, and distributing workloads within technical product roadmaps or project plans.
- A minimum of 3 years of experience monitoring and maintaining production-grade network infrastructure.
- A minimum of 2 years of experience holding partial or full responsibility for payment gateways or integrations.
- A minimum of 2 years of experience leading the successful delivery of a credible security posture within an established user-centric organisation.
- A minimum of 2 years being directly involved in front-end UX decision-making and execution.
- Has a reliable understanding of journey-mapping and developing UI patterns.
- Is proficient in dependency-free methods of ensuring browser compatibility and meeting accessibility needs.
- Has experience with or a good understanding of leveraging value from custom webpack configurations.
