Chief Technology Officer

We are hiring a CTO to own the technology strategy, architecture, engineering organisation and operational reliability of our SaaS platform. You will take a launched product with real enterprise clients and turn it into a scalable, secure, high-velocity engineering business.You will be accountable for everything from the platform roadmap and technical architecture to team structure, delivery discipline, security and compliance, cloud cost, and the day-to-day reliability of the production service. You will work directly with the CEO on product direction and commercial commitments, and you will be the technical face of Beam to enterprise clients, partners and auditors.This is a hands-on leadership role. We expect you to set direction and build the team, and also to be close enough to the code, the pipelines and the incidents to know when something is wrong before you are told.What you will doTechnology strategy and architectureDefine and own the platform's technical vision and multi-year roadmap, aligned with commercial priorities and client commitments.Own the architecture: multi-tenant SaaS design, scalability, data model, integration and API strategy, and the evolution from a single-anchor-client build to a broad enterprise customer base.Make and document key technology decisions (build vs. buy, infrastructure components, third-party services) with clear cost/benefit reasoning.Drive the adoption of an AI-enabled development lifecycle across the engineering organisation — AI-assisted coding, automated code review, test generation and documentation — with measurable productivity gains.Engineering organisation and deliveryBuild, structure and lead the engineering team: backend, frontend, QA, DevOps/SRE and product-adjacent roles, including internal staff, contractors and offshore/nearshore partners.Hire, onboard, coach and evaluate engineers and leads; define career paths and performance standards.Establish engineering practices: agile delivery, code review, branching and release strategy, definition of done, technical documentation.Own delivery predictability: release cadence, velocity, quality metrics and technical debt management, in partnership with project coordination.Ensure estimates and commitments made to clients are realistic and met.Platform operations and reliabilityOwn production: uptime, performance, incident management, on-call, disaster recovery and business continuity.Define and meet SLAs/SLOs for enterprise clients; own post-incident reviews and remediation.Own the cloud environment (Azure) and DevOps toolchain (Azure DevOps — Repos, Boards, Pipelines; Application Insights): CI/CD performance, environment strategy, observability, infrastructure as code.Manage cloud and tooling spend; forecast and optimise infrastructure cost as the client base grows.Security, compliance and riskOwn the security posture of the platform and the engineering organisation: secure SDLC, access control, secrets management, vulnerability management, penetration testing.Lead compliance efforts relevant to enterprise SaaS (GDPR, ISO 27001 / SOC 2 readiness, client security questionnaires and audits).Maintain a technology risk register and present it to management.Product and client engagementPartner with the CEO and product stakeholders on prioritisation, scoping and feasibility.Act as senior technical counterpart to enterprise clients: solution design, integration discussions, escalations, executive reviews.Support sales and onboarding with technical due diligence, architecture presentations and proof-of-concepts.Evaluate and integrate third-party services (e.g. notification, identity, analytics, AI providers) and manage vendor relationships.Management reportingReport to the CEO and steering committee on roadmap progress, engineering capacity, platform health, security status, risks and budget.Contribute to company planning: headcount, budget, and technology investments.What we are looking forMust-have10+ years in software engineering, including 4+ years leading engineering teams (Head of Engineering, VP Engineering, CTO or equivalent) in a SaaS or product company.Proven ownership of a multi-tenant, cloud-hosted B2B SaaS platform in production with enterprise clients.Deep hands-on background in modern web platform engineering: backend services and APIs, relational databases, React or comparable frontend stack, cloud infrastructure.Strong experience with Microsoft Azure and Azure DevOps (or equivalent cloud/DevOps toolchains with willingness to operate on Azure).Track record of building and scaling engineering teams, including distributed teams and external contractors.Practical experience with CI/CD, observability, incident management and SRE practices.Solid understanding of application security and enterprise compliance requirements (GDPR; ISO 27001 or SOC 2 exposure).Commercial awareness: able to reason about cost, client commitments and business impact, not only technical elegance.Excellent written and spoken English; able to communicate clearly with both engineers and executives.Right to work in the EU.Nice-to-haveExperience taking a product from anchor-client build to multi-client scale.Experience with AI-assisted engineering tooling (e.g. Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) and integrating LLM-based features into products.Experience in professional-services, legal, or other regulated B2B domains.Experience managing outsourced or offshore development entities.French, German or Portuguese.Relevant certifications (Azure Solutions Architect, CISSP/CISM, or similar).Personal profileOwner mentality: you treat uptime, security and delivery as your personal responsibility.Pragmatic and decisive; you choose the sound solution over the fashionable one.Direct and transparent; you surface problems early and with facts.Calm under pressure, structured, and able to prioritise across product, people and operations simultaneously.Still curious and technically current; comfortable reviewing code and architecture in detail.