CTO

Talentfoot Executive Search; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity stake

Job summary

Talentfoot Executive Search represents a client rebuilding access to commercial credit for mid-sized American businesses. You will own the technology and the engineering organization as the founding CTO, with equity and strategic influence from day one.

You will define the architectural direction, security posture, and roadmap, and build the team from zero. You will work with lenders, auditors, and investors as the technical voice of the company, delivering a production-ready platform.

Qualifications

• A track record as the primary technical leader at an early-stage company, taking a product from MVP through scale in production.
• 10+ years of progressive software engineering experience with meaningful time in a senior technical leadership seat, or equivalent experience providing comparable depth.
• Senior-level proficiency across a modern TypeScript stack: React, tRPC, PostgreSQL with an ORM such as Drizzle, monorepo architecture, Zod, and end-to-end type safety from schema through UI.
• Demonstrated ownership of security and compliance work in a regulated or institutionally scrutinized environment, including audit preparation and remediation.
• Proven success partnering with non-technical founders or executives who hold the domain expertise, with a genuine preference for that dynamic.
• A communication rhythm that is constant and unprompted: daily cadence, working sessions, and bad news delivered early.
• Willingness to hold and defend a strong technical opinion, including telling the founders they are wrong and explaining why.

Responsibilities

• Own the full technical strategy and roadmap, including sequencing decision between hardening the current platform for launch and rebuilding for long-term scale.
• Bring the platform through security, controls, and audit readiness required for institutional lender onboarding, including SOC 2 readiness, penetration testing, RBAC, activity logging, and evidence documentation.
• Establish architecture and engineering standards: modular structure, enforced boundaries across user surfaces, a versioned component library, reviewed migrations, and end-to-end type safety.
• Take ownership of the financial spreading and comparison engines, including accuracy validation, confidence gating, and audit trail for institutional diligence teams.
• Recruit, hire, and lead the engineering team, and set the standards every contributor including contractors is held to.
• Partner directly with two non-technical co-founders, translating business requirements into technical specifications and teaching the technical side of the business as you go.
• Represent the platform's technical position to lenders, auditors, and prospective investors.
• Own CI/CD, observability, performance, and infrastructure cost as the platform scales.

Skills

Technical leadership

Security/compliance

TypeScript

Architectural design

Hiring/leadership

Tools

React

tRPC

PostgreSQL

Drizzle ORM

Monorepo

Job description

Our client is rebuilding how mid-sized American businesses access commercial credit, replacing a broker-driven process that has stayed offline while every adjacent corner of finance went digital. Their platform is a permissioned, two-sided marketplace where qualified businesses post structured financing requests and vetted institutional lenders compete on terms, backed by a proprietary engine that turns raw accounting data into bank-grade financial analysis in minutes rather than days. The founding team comes out of investment banking and capital markets, and they run the business the way they built the product: direct, evidence-driven, and allergic to hierarchy for its own sake. With a functionally complete platform and institutional lender interest already in motion, they are hiring a Founding CTO to own the technology and the engineering organization as the company moves into market.

Position Overview

This is a true founding technical seat, not a CTO title on top of an existing engineering org. You will be the sole technical decision-maker with no escalation path above you and no platform team below you, which means you own architecture, security posture, roadmap sequencing, vendor selection, and every hire who follows. The near-term mandate is real and measurable: get the platform through the security and controls threshold required to transact with institutional lenders, then move it from functionally complete to institutionally production-ready. The founders are open to naming the right person a co-founder, and equity is sized accordingly. You will sit in front of lenders, auditors, and investors as the technical voice of the company, and you will build the engineering team from zero with your own judgment about who belongs on it.

Position Responsibilities

• Own the full technical strategy and roadmap, including the sequencing decision between hardening the current platform for launch and rebuilding for long-term scale
• Bring the platform through the security, controls, and audit readiness required for institutional lender onboarding, including SOC 2 readiness, penetration testing, RBAC, activity logging, and evidence documentation
• Establish architecture and engineering standards: modular structure, enforced boundaries across user surfaces, a versioned component library, reviewed migrations, and end-to-end type safety
• Take ownership of the financial spreading and comparison engines, including accuracy validation, confidence gating, and the audit trail institutional diligence teams will ask to see
• Recruit, hire, and lead the engineering team, and set the standards every contributor including contractors is held to
• Partner directly with two non-technical co-founders, translating business requirements into technical specifications and teaching the technical side of the business as you go
• Represent the platform's technical position to lenders, auditors, and prospective investors
• Own CI/CD, observability, performance, and infrastructure cost as the platform scales

Position Qualifications

• A track record as the primary technical leader at an early-stage company, taking a product from MVP through scale in production. Once successfully is enough; twice is better
• 10+ years of progressive software engineering experience with meaningful time in a senior technical leadership seat, or equivalent experience providing comparable depth
• Senior-level proficiency across a modern TypeScript stack: React, tRPC, PostgreSQL with an ORM such as Drizzle, monorepo architecture, Zod, and end-to-end type safety from schema through UI
• Demonstrated ownership of security and compliance work in a regulated or institutionally scrutinized environment, including audit preparation and remediation
• Proven success partnering with non-technical founders or executives who hold the domain expertise, with a genuine preference for that dynamic
• A communication rhythm that is constant and unprompted: daily cadence, working sessions, and bad news delivered early
• Willingness to hold and defend a strong technical opinion, including telling the founders they are wrong and explaining why

Preferred

• Fintech, lending, or other regulated-industry experience, particularly having carried a platform through SOC 2 or bank vendor onboarding
• Experience building and retaining engineering teams, with people who want to follow you
• Comfort operating in an AI-assisted development environment while maintaining review discipline and code quality