Chief Technology Officer (CTO) – Data-as-a-Product / API Platform | GCP, PostgreSQL

Location: Remote currently; Los Angeles-area candidates strongly preferred.

The Product and Engineering teams are expected to transition to regular in-person collaboration, with a goal of approximately two days per week. A permanent office location has not yet been determined, and the team currently uses flexible LA-area co-working locations.KORE1, a nationwide provider of staffing and recruiting solutions, has an immediate opening for a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) – Data-as-a-Product / API PlatformCompensation depends on experience but is typically $215,000 - $235,000/yr, plus a profit-sharing bonus opportunity and equity.Chief Technology Officer (CTO)Our client is a growing technology company building data and API infrastructure that connects healthcare providers and technology platforms with insurance payers. The platform aggregates information from disparate payer sources, normalizes that data, and makes it reliably accessible to customers through APIs and automation.As the company enters its next phase of growth, it is evolving its technology platform to support significantly greater enterprise scale and becoming increasingly focused on data as a core product.We are looking for a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to lead the company’s engineering and data organizations through this next phase. Reporting to the CEO, you will own technology strategy and execution across payer connectivity, API infrastructure, normalized data, and future intelligence capabilities. You will partner closely with Product and the Executive team to strengthen the platform, turn data into a compounding asset, and build an engineering organization that can scale with the business. This is a hands-on executive role for a platform-fluent, data-minded leader who can move between architectural detail, team leadership, customer needs, and board-level strategy.What You’ll Own:Platform Strategy & Scale: Set and deliver the technical strategy for the company’s mission-critical payer connectivity and API platform. Assess and evolve the existing GCP-based cloud and data environment, which currently includes a mix of Firebase/NoSQL, PostgreSQL, and Snowflake, and define the appropriate future-state architecture for enterprise scale. Build for reliability, uptime, throughput, latency, observability, developer experience, and efficient unit economics.Data & AI Foundation: Turn high-volume operational transactions into trusted, governed, and queryable data. Define the path from fragmented payer inputs—including data acquired through APIs, portal automation, web scraping, and document-based sources—to normalized data models and a scalable data foundation. Establish the architecture needed to support customer-facing intelligence and practical AI capabilities that improve products and operations.Engineering Organization & Operating System: Lead as a strategic player-coach. Establish clear decision rights, planning rhythms, accountability, and delivery practices; recruit and develop exceptional engineers; and build a high-trust culture that can scale through the next stage of the company.Reliability, Quality & Security: Make reliability and quality shared engineering responsibilities across the full pipeline, from automated testing and deployment controls to ingestion validation, incident response, and self-healing systems. Ensure the appropriate technical posture and controls are in place to maintain applicable security and regulatory requirements as the company grows, partnering with internal and external security and compliance resources.Executive & Commercial Leadership: Partner with Product on roadmap and platform decisions and with Finance, Legal, Revenue, customers, and the board on tradeoffs, risk, cost, and opportunity. Translate technical choices into clear business implications and help shape company strategy without requiring constant founder intervention.What You’ll Bring:8+ years of technical leadership experience; experience operating in a startup environment strongly preferred. Experience helping scale a venture-backed company through a significant growth stage is a plus.A track record as a CTO, VP of Engineering, Head of Engineering, or senior technical architect in an API-first, data infrastructure, healthcare technology, or complex automation business. Experience building or scaling a business where data or APIs are externally delivered products—not solely internal data initiatives—is essential.Hands-on technical depth in mission-critical API platforms and production data systems, including data ingestion and pipelines, data architecture, and normalized data models. Experience building or scaling modern data warehouse, lake, or lakehouse environments is strongly preferred.Practical experience applying AI, machine learning, or automation to products, engineering workflows, or operations—with sound judgment about where these tools create durable value.Strong command of modern API design, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, data governance, and familiarity with security and compliance programs common to regulated environments.Proven ability to hire, coach, and retain strong technical teams and to communicate effectively with engineers, customers, executives, and investors.Experience working within a regulated industry such as healthcare or financial services is preferred.Familiarity with RPA, web scraping, portal automation, document ingestion, or similar approaches to acquiring, ingesting, and normalizing data from disparate and unstructured sources is a plus.Comfort operating in a lean, scrappy startup environment and building the people, processes, and technology needed as the organization scales.First-Year Impact Plan:Within 30 days: Learn & AssessUnderstand the Business: Build a working understanding of the company’s customers, workflows, monetization model, and strategic priorities through structured conversations with leaders, customers, and key partners.Assess the Technology: Assess connectivity, APIs, data stores, automation systems, cloud architecture, security controls, observability, and cost drivers; identify the most material risks and opportunities.Understand the Team: Meet with every engineer and key cross-functional partner to understand strengths, capability gaps, morale, delivery friction, and the current product–engineering operating model.Clarify Ownership: Clarify near-term ownership across Engineering, QA, technical support, defect triage, and production incidents, and surface any organizational decisions the executive team must resolve.Within 60 days: Align on StrategyProduct–Engineering Collaboration: Establish a shared cadence and clear decision rights for strategy, prioritization, architecture, delivery, and tradeoffs between Product and Engineering.Technical Strategy: Present a sequenced strategy for API scalability, platform connectivity and resilience, data normalization, AI enablement, and future intelligence products, with explicit investment choices and success measures.Data & AI Blueprint: Define the target data architecture, governance model, ingestion and quality controls, and a prioritized portfolio of AI opportunities tied to customer or operating value.Quality, Security & Reliability Plan: Set the roadmap and measurable baselines for automated testing, data validation, incident management, observability, security and compliance controls, and cloud cost visibility.Within 90 days: Mobilize the PlanPlatform Roadmap in Motion: Begin the highest-value platform and data initiatives identified through the assessment, with accountable owners, milestones, and measurable outcomes rather than a predetermined architecture.Strengthen Engineering Execution: Introduce quality gates, delivery metrics, and CI/CD improvements that increase predictability and catch regressions earlier without creating unnecessary processes.Improve Reliability & Scale: Launch targeted improvements against the most important reliability, latency, throughput, queueing, incident response, and cloud cost constraints surfaced in the audit.Organization Plan: Deliver a 12-month organization and hiring plan across backend, data, AI and automation, infrastructure, and technical leadership, aligned with the strategy and company plan.Within 6 months: Deliver Measurable ImprovementsPlatform Hardening: Demonstrate measurable gains in the platform health indicators that matter most—such as quality, availability, latency, throughput, mean time to detect and recover, or transaction cost.Trusted Data Foundation: Put the agreed data architecture into production use so authorized internal teams can reliably query governed, normalized data and monitor its quality.Data Product Direction: Partner with Product and go-to-market leaders to validate priority use cases, customer value, technical prerequisites, and monetization pathways for intelligence products.Security & Compliance: Validate data isolation, access controls, credential management, incident readiness, and the technical controls needed to maintain applicable security and regulatory requirements.Within 12 months: Build Enduring AdvantageCommercial Data Capability: Together with Product, validate and launch a differentiated intelligence capability that improves active customer workflows and has a credible monetization path.Scale Readiness: Build an investor- and enterprise-ready technical package covering platform architecture, reliability, security, cloud economics, data asset growth, and the roadmap to the next stage of scale.Automation & Resilience: Deploy production-grade automation and AI where justified to detect, diagnose, and recover from integration or external connection failures, reducing manual operating overhead.

What We Offer

The annual salary range for this role is $215k - $235k, plus a profit-sharing bonus opportunity.As a key new hire, you will be eligible to participate in the company’s stock option program.Our client currently operates remotely, with opportunities for in-person collaboration throughout the year.Flexible Paid Time Off.401(k).Company-sponsored health benefits including medical, dental, vision, and life insurance.