Chief Technology Officer

Plenty of established software businesses carry the same quiet problem. The product works and customers depend on it every day. But underneath, the platform hasn’t kept pace with the business built on top of it.

This one has decided to fix that properly.

It’s a profitable, market-leading vertical SaaS business whose platform sits at the centre of its customers’ day-to-day operations, from bookings and billing through to reporting. It has loyal customers, recurring revenue, and a board with a clear plan and a defined exit horizon.

What it doesn’t have yet is the technical leader to take the platform from where it is today to where it needs to be.

The challenge is a classic legacy transformation, with real commercial stakes attached. There’s a mature legacy codebase, a small in-house team and an external development partner. The short-term roadmap still has to ship while the long-term architecture gets rethought underneath it. The hard part isn’t the technology. It’s the sequencing: what to modernise, what to replace and what to leave alone, without disrupting the customers who run their businesses on it.

You’ll own technology end to end. That means evaluating the current platform and partner relationship, making the big team and product investment calls, and building a modern in-house engineering function to carry the business forward. You’ll work hand in glove with the CEO as a genuine partner and be the technical voice in the boardroom. The business is small enough that every decision you make shows up in the numbers.

The next chapter’s technology is yours to shape. That includes cloud and architecture direction, build vs buy, delivery practices and engineering standards. It also includes how AI gets embedded into the product and the way the team works, as part of the core platform rather than a side experiment.

The cash is competitive, but the real upside is the equity. There’s a management incentive plan with a planned exit in 2030. The CEO wants someone who’d rather build value than optimise salary, and sees the base as the means, not the reward. If the plan lands, the MIP is where this role pays off.

The culture is lean, direct and outcome-driven. The leadership is commercially sharp and moves quickly, and expects the same from technology. It suits someone who measures success by what the business achieves, not hours logged.

As a CTO you'll enjoy this if you:

• Have been a CTO for 4+ years, at least once
• Have led a legacy platform transformation and kept the lessons
• Are as comfortable in a board meeting as in an architecture review
• Want your upside tied directly to the value you create
• Get energised by real ownership in a business where you can see the impact
• Prefer a rough diamond to a polished machine

You don’t need experience in this sector. What matters is sound engineering judgement, the gravitas to lead at board level, and the drive to see a transformation through to exit.