Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

About the Role

• Architecture direction across frontend, backend services, data, and the Kubernetes platform

• Engineering standards: testability by design, observability, CI/CD (Bitbucket Pipelines), and pragmatic quality practices

• Security, resilience, and data protection appropriate to regulated operational data

• Technology and build-vs-buy decisions, including how AI is used in the development workflow

• Leadership of the engineering organization: hiring, structure, and team topology

• Developing engineering managers and tech leads into decision-makers

• Executive-level communication with the CEO, leadership team, board, and key customers

• Budget, vendor, and capacity planning for the technology function

• You spend time with operators and bring what you learn back into technical decisions, surfacing feasibility, cost, and risk early so the roadmap is sequenced with trade-offs visible rather than discovered late

• You lead your team to give the business a grounded view of what the platform can deliver and by when - and your work is judged by adoption, retention, and operational impact rather than delivery volume

• A senior engineering leadership track record, CTO, VP Engineering, or equivalent, in a B2B SaaS product company

• Hands-on engineering credibility earned in code; you can reason about architecture trade-offs without translation and review code easily

• Experience taking a product from single-market success to multi-market or multi-tenant scale, ideally where an ERP-style platform is the customer’s operational system of record

• Familiarity with cloud-native, service-oriented systems in Kubernetes or comparable environments, and with a modern stack like ours (Python / FastAPI, React-based frontends, relational data at scale)

• Demonstrated ownership of engineering quality: automated testing, observability, and CI/CD as defaults rather than initiatives

• You think about the product being made, not only the technology making it

• You can talk with a customer and come back with a sharper problem statement, not a feature list

• You lead through clarity and decisions rather than process weight, and treat product and engineering as one system

• You coach and grow the leaders around you, and you are curious about how AI-assisted development changes both what we build and how we build it

• Background in platform engineering, SRE, or data-intensive systems

• Experience integrating AI capabilities into a production product with real reliability constraints

• Board or investor reporting experience

• Fluent English is the working language of the engineering team; Finnish is a strong plus but not strictly required

• Hybrid model: approximately 3 days per week at our office in Pasila, Helsinki, a 5-minute walk from Pasila train station

• Product, engineering, and commercial leadership work from one roadmap, so delivery is predictable enough for the business to plan around

• Architecture and product direction move together

• Engineering leaders make good decisions without escalation, and AI-assisted development improves throughput and quality together

• Full ownership of technology and a real voice in product decisions, with a seat at the executive table and direct influence on company strategy

• Work on software that supports real operational systems in the circular economy

• A pragmatic engineering culture focused on long-term quality rather than delivery theatre

• Experienced engineers who value ownership and practical solutions