Chief Technology Officer

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Chief Technology Officer based in Portugal.

This is a hands-on C-level technology leadership role focused on transforming a SaaS engineering organization into a high-velocity, product-focused team.
You will own the technology vision, engineering strategy, R&D budget, technical direction, and infrastructure roadmap.
The role combines deep technical leadership with business strategy, people development, security, and operational excellence.
You’ll lead a small, senior engineering team while remaining close enough to the work to contribute directly when needed.
A major focus will be embedding AI-assisted development practices and building sustainable improvements in engineering productivity.
You’ll oversee large-scale distributed infrastructure, Kubernetes, DevOps, security, compliance, and cost optimization.
Working closely with executives, product leaders, customers, and the board, you’ll help shape how technology drives long-term business and customer value.

• Own the overall technology vision, roadmap, and engineering strategy, ensuring technical priorities remain closely aligned with business objectives and customer value.

• Lead the transformation toward a high-velocity, product-focused engineering organization that consistently delivers valuable features and improvements.

• Introduce and scale AI-assisted development tools and practices, establishing appropriate quality standards, review processes, and responsible usage across engineering workflows.

• Own architecture and infrastructure decisions with a holistic approach to total cost of ownership, balancing hosting costs, maintenance requirements, technical debt, and engineering opportunity costs.

• Oversee a multi-region, Kubernetes-based production environment, maintaining high standards for reliability, operational hygiene, performance, and cost efficiency.

• Monitor and optimize infrastructure economics, including unit costs and cost per render, while maintaining the reliability and scalability required by a high-volume SaaS platform.

• Maintain high standards across software quality, performance, security, scalability, and reliability.

• Track emerging technologies and changes in engineering practices, identifying innovations that can meaningfully improve how products are built and delivered.

• Represent the technology organization with customers, partners, executives, board members, and other external stakeholders.

• Own security and compliance as an ongoing operational program, including maintaining certification readiness, audit processes, ownership structures, and organizational resilience.

• Guide and mentor engineers, establish clear expectations, support career development, and foster a culture of ownership, accountability, diversity, and inclusion.

• Build an environment where engineers take responsibility for their technical decisions and continuously identify and resolve delivery bottlenecks.

• Own the continuous improvement cycle for engineering delivery, using measurable outcomes to identify constraints and improve development speed over time.

• Strengthen DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, observability, monitoring, and operational processes.

• Define meaningful engineering metrics and use data to improve workflows, delivery performance, infrastructure efficiency, and team effectiveness.

• Lead organizational and technical changes thoughtfully, ensuring affected teams and customers receive appropriate communication, context, and opportunities to raise concerns before changes are implemented.

• Partner with the CEO and broader leadership team on company strategy and communicate technology progress, priorities, risks, and investments to executive and board-level stakeholders.

• Collaborate closely with Product to align engineering capacity and priorities with customer needs and commercial objectives.

• Translate complex technical concepts into clear business language and advocate for technology investments that support growth and customer value.

• Own the complete R&D budget, including personnel, infrastructure, tooling, vendors, and other technology-related investments.

• Maintain accurate infrastructure cost models and forecasts, monitor actual spending against plans, and understand the financial implications of major technical decisions.

• Operate with a high degree of autonomy, making sound engineering decisions without unnecessary micromanagement while remaining aligned with company strategy.

Requirements:

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 5+ years in senior engineering leadership positions such as VP Engineering, Director of Engineering, or CTO within a SaaS environment.

• Strong infrastructure expertise, including experience operating large-scale distributed systems and production Kubernetes environments.

• Demonstrated ability to make strategic tradeoffs between infrastructure costs, maintenance burden, technical quality, and engineering velocity.

• Experience managing and optimizing infrastructure unit economics for a production platform or comparable large-scale system.

• Proven ability to introduce AI tooling into engineering workflows and meaningfully improve team productivity while maintaining appropriate standards for quality, security, review, and reliability.

• Demonstrated experience transforming engineering teams and establishing improvements in delivery speed that remain sustainable beyond an initial transformation period.

• Strong track record of implementing new engineering processes, platforms, or ways of working and successfully bringing the affected teams along through the change.

• Experience owning or leading an ongoing SaaS security and compliance program, with exposure to SOC 2, ISO 27001, or an equivalent framework.

• Strong understanding of scalable, high-performance web products, CI/CD, DevOps, cloud infrastructure, observability, and modern security principles.

• Business-oriented mindset with the ability to connect engineering decisions to revenue, customer outcomes, operational efficiency, and broader business strategy.

• Hands-on approach to technical leadership, with the ability and willingness to contribute directly alongside engineering teams rather than operating exclusively at a strategic distance.

• Experience coaching, mentoring, and developing senior engineering talent, ideally during a significant organizational or technical transformation.

• Excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills, including confidence working with executives, boards, customers, and cross-functional teams.

• Ability to explain complex technical topics clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.

• Strong written communication skills and comfort working in an async-first remote environment, with a focus on clear documentation, timely updates, and proactive context-sharing.

• Experience working in remote-first or distributed teams is valuable.

• Experience with SEO, search technology, web crawling, or related domains is a plus.

Benefits:

• 100% remote working model with the flexibility to work from wherever you are based within the supported European locations.

• High degree of autonomy and ownership within a high-trust environment.

• C-level position with a seat at the executive table, direct influence over technology strategy, and visibility at board level.

• Significant opportunity to transform engineering practices, product development, infrastructure, and technology operations.

• Flexible working approach designed to support asynchronous collaboration and sustainable productivity.

• Low-bureaucracy environment focused on maintaining momentum and avoiding unnecessary meetings.

• Opportunity to work closely with a small, experienced, and collaborative engineering team.

• Access to a broader international SaaS professional community for knowledge sharing, collaboration, and networking.

• Flexible time off to support sustainable performance and personal wellbeing.

• Generous learning and development budget covering courses, conferences, books, and other professional resources.

• Location-adjusted compensation designed around local market conditions for a remote-first environment.

• Salary expectations are discussed transparently during the recruitment process and shared in writing before the first interview.

• Opportunity to work at the intersection of SaaS, AI-assisted engineering, distributed systems, infrastructure, and product innovation.