Chief Technology Officer
Position Overview: As part of a recent $10M series A investment, Praetorian is building out the executive team and actively seeking a seasoned CTO with a demonstrated track record of success that can provide inspirational and technical leadership. Reporting to the CEO and partnering with the VP of Engineering and the VP of Product, you will be responsible for setting the technical direction and strategy, converting business requirements into technology and design blueprints, and translating our long-term research and development bets into business outcomes.
Company Overview: At Praetorian, we are bringing together the world's cybersecurity expertise to address one of the great technical challenges of our era: to be safe and secure in a digital-first world. From cryptocurrency exchanges to autonomous vehicles, we apply expertise and engineering to find, fix, stop, and ultimately solve cybersecurity problems across our customers’ digital landscape and product portfolios. Our accolades include Inc’s Best Places to Work and Fastest Growing Companies for 7 years running. Our employees are collaborative innovators who put our customers first and care about doing real and permanent good.
Career opportunity:
- Join an industry with massive socio, economic, and political importance in the 21st century
- Work alongside some of the best and the brightest minds in the security industry
- Leave an indelible mark on a company where individual performance has real impact
- Be recognized, internally and publicly, for your contributions in a high profile position
- Align your career trajectory with a hyper growth company that is on the move
- Be part of the leadership team designing and building out our first product
- Help drive novel research, that if successful, will be game changing to the security industry
Accountable for:
- Partnering with product and engineering to bring quality software to our customers
- Aligning the strategy, planning, and execution of the technology roadmap with the company's business objectives
- Translating the company's long term bets and research and development initiatives into business outcomes
Starting with:
- A seasoned Executive team that has created a profitable company with a $20M run rate
- A seasoned VP Engineering with an experienced software development team
- Multiple closed beta customers with a hundreds of thousands in ARR
- $10M in series A funding
If this position is wildly successful, in one year you will have:
- Successfully designed a platform that can match the scaling and cost optimization requirements of a freemium offering
- Architected a scan and correlation engine that meets our core value proposition commitments to our customers
- Assisted the engineering team operationalize our AI research and development into our vulnerability discovery pipelines
- Created a flexible, extensible, and portable architecture that allows customer-based customization and an ecosystem of partner-based integrations
- Contributed to the attraction of A players to the research, development, and engineering teams
Core responsibilities:
- Provide the technical vision, set the technical direction, and convert the technical strategy into an actionable roadmap
- Align technology decisions and design strategies with the company's near term and long term objectives
- Lead a small, but talent dense team of architects and seasoned engineers that advise and assist product, engineering, and services
- Provide technological, design, and architectural leadership to Engineering and Product Management
- Lead a small, but talent dense artificial intelligence team that is conducting groundbreaking research in vulnerability discovery
- Guide the company's long-term innovation bets and manage the company's Research & Development initiatives
- Identify, compare, and decide on technology solutions that will meet current and future needs
- Develop strategic plans and set timelines for evaluation, development, and deployment of all technologies
- Keep up with market trends to ensure our technical strategy stays current and contributes to our competitive advantage
- Collaborate with Product Management to transform requirements into technical specifications and software designs within an agile environment
- Collaborate with Engineering to balance the trade-offs between short-term development velocity and long-term technical debt
- Collaborate with Services by guiding and influencing the structure and composition of our engineering rotational program and how engineers and computer scientists from Services spend and effectively utilize their engineering time
- Assist in the recruitment, development, and retention of high performing technical talent
Required qualifications:
- 10 years of experience as a technology executive
- 10 years of people management experience leading a high performing team of architects, developers, and researchers
- Prior experience in a high growth, venture funded tech startup
- Prior software engineering, architecture, and research & development experience
- Experience architecting complex platforms using modern tech stacks, design patterns, and development practices
- Highest pinnacle of technical excellence with an ability to inspire confidence within your team and other departments and stakeholders
- Knack for cross-cutting technical excellence with pragmatic business acumen that allows you to serve as a trusted advisor to the CEO
- Track record of recruiting, mentoring, and scaling engineering talent and building a strong engineering culture in an agile environment
- Experience in a high-accountability, cross-functional environment who can work collaboratively and effectively with services, product, & engineering
- BS in computer science, engineering, physics, or mathematics
Desired qualifications:
- Experience with rapid innovation processes and agile/scrum development practices
- Experience with single page applications, micro-service architectures, and event driven architectures
- Experience with artificial intelligence and an ability to lead the machine learning and data science team
- Prior background in the cybersecurity domain a major plus
- MS in computer science or computer engineering
Desired behaviors:
- Exceptional team management skills with excellent verbal and written communication
- Ability to helicopter up and down between long-term technical strategy and day-to-day short-term needs
- Ability to simplify the complicated and direct team members to the highest-leveraged activities
- Ability to maintain high levels of output and work ethic
- Personable individual who enjoys working in a team-oriented environment
- Comfort dealing with ambiguity in an environment where we build the plane as we fly it
- Ability to self-direct work, orient to action, and truly own the position in a hyper-growth environment
Compensation & Benefits:
- Highly competitive salary
- Employee stock option plan
- Annual budget for training, certifications, and conferences
- 16 weeks of fully paid maternity and paternity leave
- 90% employee coverage and 60% dependent coverage on health insurance premiums
- 100% employee coverage and 60% dependent coverage on dental and vision insurance premiums
- 4% company 401K matching vested immediately
We are committed to an inclusive and diverse Praetorian. We are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, ethnicity, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, veteran status, genetic information, marital status, or any other legally protected status.