CTO - Chief Technology Officer
About The Position
Search Atlas bootstrapped to $32M ARR without venture funding. Now we're pioneering agentic marketing - AI systems that don't just analyze, they act autonomously for marketers at scale. We're hiring a deeply technical CTO to own our platform architecture and scale it to $100M+ ARR. You'll work side-by-side with our Founder (current CTO) for 6-12 months, then become the technical voice of the company. This is not a turnaround. It's a "make bulletproof what's working" challenge. Your Technical Reality You'll inherit and evolve a mature, battle-tested platform: Backend: Python 3, Django REST Framework, Celery. Databases: PostgreSQL (transactional), ClickHouse (analytics), Elasticsearch. Infrastructure: Kubernetes, Docker, microservices. Frontend: Next.js, React, TypeScript, MobX. Observability: Sentry, Datadog, Grafana. AI/ML: LLMs in production, agentic systems architecture. Scale Context: Terabytes of search data, sub-100ms latency, 99.99% uptime for Fortune 500s.
Requirements
- 10+ years software engineering, 5+ years senior tech leadership (VP/CTO).
- Proven track record scaling SaaS: $20M to $100M+ ARR (you've done this before).
- Hands-on technical depth: Can review Python/Django, optimize PostgreSQL, architect distributed systems.
- AI/ML fluency: LLMs and agentic systems in production, not just prototypes.
- Capital-efficient mindset: Bootstrapped or capital-efficient environment experience.
- Team leadership: Led 100+ engineers in high-output environments with <15% attrition.
Nice To Haves
- MarTech/SEO domain knowledge
- Search infrastructure experience
- Remote-first team leadership
Responsibilities
- Platform Architecture
- Scale crawling infrastructure from millions to 10x volume without proportional cost increase.
- Productionize AI agents for autonomous marketing actions at enterprise-grade reliability.
- Build resilient data pipelines that never lose a crawl or corrupt indexes.
- Evolve observability from reactive monitoring to predictive reliability.
- Engineering Excellence
- Grow engineering from 100+ to 150+ while maintaining velocity and code quality.
- Mentor Principal Engineers and Tech Leads on architecture decisions.
- Instill ownership culture where engineers own features end-to-end.
- Technical Innovation
- Drive agentic AI roadmap: systems that reason, act, and learn autonomously.
- Evaluate emerging tech: vector databases, LLM architectures, edge computing.
- Make hard calls on prioritization between features, platform, and technical debt.
Benefits
- Health
- Dental
- Vision
- Unlimited PTO
- Parental leave
- Development budget
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Executive
Education Level
No Education Listed
