Chief Technology Officer

Praetorian Group International - Austin, TX

Full-time - Executive

Austin, TX

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

About the position

The Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Praetorian is a senior leadership role responsible for setting the technical direction and strategy of the company. The CTO will work closely with the CEO and Chief Product Officer to convert business requirements into technology blueprints and drive long-term research and development initiatives into tangible business outcomes. This position is pivotal in leading a talented team of engineers and architects, ensuring the delivery of quality software, and aligning technology with the company's business objectives.

Responsibilities

• Provide the technical vision, set the technical direction, and convert the technical strategy into an actionable roadmap.
• Align technology decisions and design strategies with the company's near term and long term objectives.
• Lead a small, but talent dense team of architects and seasoned engineers that advise and assist product, engineering, and services.
• Provide technological, design, and architectural leadership to Engineering and Product Management.
• Lead a small, but talent dense artificial intelligence team that is conducting groundbreaking research in vulnerability discovery.
• Guide the company's long-term innovation bets and manage the company's Research & Development initiatives.
• Identify, compare, and decide on technology solutions that will meet current and future needs.
• Develop strategic plans and set timelines for evaluation, development, and deployment of all technologies.
• Keep up with market trends to ensure our technical strategy stays current and contributes to our competitive advantage.
• Collaborate with Product Management to transform requirements into technical specifications and software designs within an agile environment.
• Collaborate with Engineering to balance the trade-offs between short-term development velocity and long-term technical debt.
• Collaborate with Services by guiding and influencing the structure and composition of our engineering rotational program and how engineers and computer scientists from Services spend and effectively utilize their engineering time.
• Assist in the recruitment, development, and retention of high performing technical talent.

Requirements

• 10 years of experience as a technology executive
• 10 years of people management experience leading a high performing team of architects, developers, and researchers
• Prior experience in a high growth, venture funded tech startup
• Prior software engineering, architecture, and research & development experience
• Deep experience architecting complex platforms using modern tech stacks, design patterns, and development practices
• Highest pinnacle of technical excellence with an ability to inspire confidence within your team and other departments and stakeholders
• Knack for cross-cutting technical excellence with pragmatic business acumen that allows you to serve as a trusted advisor to the CEO
• Track record of recruiting, mentoring, and scaling engineering talent and building a strong engineering culture in an agile environment
• Experience in a high-accountability, cross-functional environment who can work collaboratively and effectively with services, product, & engineering
• BS in computer science, engineering, physics, or mathematics

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with rapid innovation processes and agile/scrum development practices
• Experience with single page applications, micro-service architectures, and event driven architectures
• Experience with artificial intelligence and an ability to lead the machine learning and data science team
• Prior background in the cybersecurity domain a major plus
• MS in computer science or computer engineering

Benefits

• Highly competitive salary
• Employee stock option plan
• 90% employee coverage and 60% dependent coverage on health insurance premiums
• 100% employee coverage and 60% dependent coverage on dental and vision insurance premiums
• 4% company 401K matching vested immediately