Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
Location: Buckinghamshire - (2 Days week in office)
An established, mission-critical SaaS business is seeking a Chief Technology Officer to lead both technology and product at a pivotal moment of change.
The platform supports the majority of universities across the UK and Ireland and is deeply embedded in customer operations. After several incomplete transformation initiatives, the business needs a credible technology leader to restore stability, rebuild customer confidence, and define a pragmatic modernisation strategy.
This is not a traditional CTO role. You will own both technical strategy and product direction, ensuring alignment between architecture, delivery, and customer value. Reporting directly to the CEO, you will lead a team of 50+ engineers and product professionals and manage a multi-million-pound technology budget.
The technology estate includes legacy and modern systems (Delphi, .NET, Go, AWS, SQL Server). A serverless AWS migration is under evaluation, supported by an AI-driven PoC - you will decide the direction based on evidence, not assumption.
Key Focus Areas
- Lead and stabilise a complex, multi-stack platform
- Decide and execute a sustainable modernisation approach
- Own the product roadmap and prioritisation
- Improve quality, reliability, and engineering discipline
- Restructure teams around product domains
- Rebuild trust with customers and senior stakeholders
Essential Experience & Attributes
Technical & Architectural Credibility
- Proven success modernising legacy platforms (completed, not attempted)
- Deep understanding of incremental migration patterns (e.g. strangler fig)
- Comfort operating across legacy and modern stacks
- Strong grasp of software economics, technical debt, and migration risk
- Experience with SQL Server, AWS serverless, C#, Go, React (or equivalents)
- Understanding of security, compliance and data governance in regulated environments
Product & Commercial Leadership
- Ownership of product strategy and roadmaps in B2B SaaS environments
- Ability to prioritise under commercial pressure using evidence
- Experience delivering product-market fit in complex or vertical SaaS domains
Operational & People Leadership
- Track record of materially improving software quality and reliability
- Experience building high-performing, scalable engineering organisations
- Ability to lead transformation without sacrificing morale or retention
- Comfortable with honest assessment of organisational capability
Communication & Influence
- Able to articulate complex strategies to non-technical stakeholders
- Board-level communication with evidence-based reporting
- Proven ability to rebuild customer trust through delivery
Desirable (Not Essential)
- Experience in higher education technology or regulated vertical SaaS
- Background in investor-backed or portfolio-owned software businesses
- Practical exposure to AI-augmented development approaches
- Experience modernising legacy systems using code-as-data or knowledge graph techniques
Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
Location: Buckinghamshire - (2 Days week in office)
