Chief Technology Officer

Who you are

You are an all-in tech mind with a strong drive for technological enablement. You have gained experience in a number of different areas in IT, ideally not only as a developer working on cutting edge languages and frameworks, but also as the one responsible for the overall picture of digital transformation journeys. You can talk code, and data, not only with your fellow hands-on teammates, but also with internal and external stakeholders with little or none technical knowledge. Yet, you do believe that tech is not just an add-on to sprinkle here and there on the product: on the contrary, it is the very essence of a ‘wow’ product experience.

You can make sound decisions around software and hardware, in a world where solutions abound and the latest tooling on the block may not be the best choice to bring the product forward, and scale up a solution. In this sense, you come with your personal preferences on the technology stack for a number of different areas (cloud providers, programming languages and frameworks, IoT and domotics…), substantiated by relevant work experiences. At the same time, you are not stuck with one approach or the other, and you can take decisions bringing a number of factors into consideration (from the know-how needed, vendor agreements, maturity of a solution etc).

Finally, you have what it takes to be the “employee number three” of a very promising and ambitious startup: the salary will reflect the great expectations the founding team has from you, and a part of the compensation will be results-based, in the form of equity.

What you will do

In your role, you will be responsible for all things tech at the company. Two main areas are:

• ultimate responsibility for the development of their core platform, first of all their mobile app; in this role, you are a tech lead
• decision making responsibilities whenever technology comes into play: think about new automation at a location, or selecting the best vendor for a service

A few examples of the activities you will engage in, on a daily basis:

• get actively involved on the design, and sometimes implementation, of critical features for the platform (critical in complexity and priority, usually), in close collaboration with the development team
• brainstorm around a new piece of smart automation for our client’s building, together with the chief product owner, and evolve the ideas into a well-designed tech blueprint
• be the shot caller in make vs. buy decisions around the building blocks of their platform, following your frameworks while keeping an eye on the overall running costs and sustainability

Your background

You have five to ten years of experience in a number of comparable roles. Or, you have taken hands-on positions in at least two tech verticals (like back- and frontend development, data engineering and science, mobile apps development, cloud solutions etc.) for five years. They do not expect that any of your past experiences matches 100% what they describe above – they do want to see some relevant overlap though.

During your past work experience, you have come to appreciate technology as a core enabler or even inner nature of a product. You might have worked as the tech lead of a banking app, or the senior developer for an online supermarket – specifics do not really matter for them, nor the industries.

Also, not really relevant whether you have earned your stripes at a big corporation or a string of startups. Our client is clearly in the latter group, so you will take the best of your experience and decline it in the ordered chaos of startup life.

Musts

• Languages: at least English and Italian (even better if your mother tongue is actually Italian).
• Relevant and verifiable credentials as a tech guy or girl.
• Big plus if you are involved in open-source projects, have talked at tech conferences, organized hackathons etc. (extracurriculars, so to say).
• Openness to a flexible schedule mixing work-from-home and office life. Travel is limited to the Milan area for now, and occasional.