CTO

Channel Fusion Hiawatha, Iowa, United States

Channel Fusion is accelerating its AI-enabled platform strategy and technical organization during a critical growth window. We are seeking a full-time Chief Technology Officer to lead AI strategy, technical modernization, and architecture direction: establishing a rigorous, real-time operating system and measurement framework for engineering that provides visibility into output, quality, and business impact, and building a comprehensive technical foundation that demonstrates platform scalability, architectural maturity, and operational excellence.

This is a full-time, hands‑on operating role — not an advisory role.

The CTO owns technology strategy, architecture standards, AI-enabled engineering transformation, cybersecurity and platform-risk direction, technology investment priorities, and enterprise technical readiness. The Head of Engineering reports to the CTO and owns the engineering organization, engineering people leadership, and day‑to‑day software delivery. The VP, Cloud Security & Client Delivery also reports to the CTO and owns cloud and security operations, compliance execution, service reliability, and client‑delivery execution.

The CTO aligns these functions and resolves cross‑functional technology, roadmap, security, client, and investment tradeoffs with the CEO and executive leadership team.

Core Mandate

• Technical Readiness & Operating Baseline — Build a comprehensive technical foundation that demonstrates platform scalability, architectural maturity, and operational excellence to internal stakeholders and enterprise partners. This includes: stored‑procedure inventory, technical debt registry (with owner, business impact, remediation plan for every material item), modernization status evidence (production validation, monitoring, rollback testing, legacy deprecation), and infrastructure/scalability metrics (concurrent users, transactions per minute, multi‑tenant support, cost per 1,000 transactions).
• Client Onboarding Scalability — Establish clear metrics and targets for client onboarding efficiency, documentation, and platform‑driven configuration to enable faster, more predictable client launches, and build the roadmap to onboard new clients at scale without linear growth in engineering headcount.
• AI Strategy & Productivity — Establish an engineering baseline and launch a controlled AI‑assisted delivery pilot within the first 30 days using a live codebase and real delivery workflows. Within the first 90 days, demonstrate measurable improvement in cycle time or throughput without deterioration in quality, security, or production reliability. Define a validated rollout plan for the remaining pods based on pilot results, including projected engineering and AI‑tooling economics.
• Architecture Direction — The CTO will initially serve as Channel Fusion's senior architecture authority and assess the technical‑leadership model during the first 30 days. The CTO may recommend principal‑level architecture capacity where demonstrated workload, technical risk, or delivery leverage justifies it. Any such position will be structured as a hands‑on technical role within the engineering organization rather than as an additional management layer.
• Operating Framework — Establish a real‑time management system that provides visibility into organizational output: a weekly pod‑level scorecard (mission, committed vs. delivered outcomes, revenue/retention supported, team size, work mix, cycle time, quality, loaded cost, and capacity, investment, ownership, and operating recommendations for each pod), and a technology economics model (fully loaded org cost, cost by pod, revenue/retention by pod, AI tooling/token costs, RPE tracking…