About Monument
Monument is the operating system for self-storage companies — the platform operators run their entire business on. Payments, GAAP-compliant accounting, physical access control, customer operations, delinquency, inventory, REIT-level revenue management, and portfolio-wide oversight all run through one system. For the self-storage operators who depend on us, Monument is the business: if it goes down, they can't take a payment or open a gate. We're the open-ecosystem alternative to the legacy incumbents that have run this $50B industry for decades, built from the ground up for multi-facility operators scaling from 3 to 100+ locations. We're Series A (~60 people) which means the platform an entire industry will rely on is still being shaped, and you'd be the one shaping it.
About the Role
The CTO will own the entire engineering function — people, delivery, operations, and quality — for a ~30-engineer team based in Brazil, and report directly to the CEO with a seat on our executive leadership team. That makes this a high-stakes seat — the reliability, security, and pace of what your team ships is what lets operators run their facilities day in and day out. To put the decision rights plainly: you own organizational, delivery, staffing, operational, budgetary, external-representation, execution, and architectural decisions.
What You'll Own
- Technical architecture & system design. Own Monument's system and data architecture — the multi-tenant data model, service boundaries, and platform design that let operators scale from a handful of locations to 100+. Make the build-vs-buy, framework, and platform calls within our Node.js/TypeScript (NestJS), React, and AWS Aurora stack, and carry the technical-debt and hard-to-reverse trade-off decisions that shape our next 2–3 years.
- Delivery. Ship the roadmap on time, on budget, and at high quality. You're accountable for execution across the org — sprint planning and backlog grooming with Product, release management, version control discipline, and holding Tech Leads, DevOps, and QA to plan.
- People & organization. Build and maintain a high-performance, high-accountability culture. You are the people manager for Tech Leads, DevOps, and the QA team — owning team structure, the end-to-end hiring process and standards, onboarding, career development, performance management, leveling, and quarterly goals.
- The AI-native SDLC transformation. Lead Monument's move to an AI-augmented software development lifecycle: select the internal AI tooling, define how we use it, and drive adoption so the team ships materially faster without sacrificing quality. This is a top company priority and a defining mandate of the role.
- Reliability & operations. Keep the platform dependable as we scale. Own incident management and on-call rotation, release operations, systems-level disaster-recovery oversight, capacity and scalability planning, and third-party vendor management (AWS, Twilio, Domo, and others). DevOps owns CI/CD and environments and reports to you.
- Security. Be accountable for Monument's overall security. Own the full threat-mitigation strategy and its execution — both active (monitoring, detection, and incident response to live and emerging threats) and passive (secure-by-design protections like access controls, encryption, hardening, and least-privilege built into every application, database, interface, and API from the start, not bolted on as we scale). The Principal Architect contributes the architecture-layer security patterns; you own that the strategy is set, enforced, and working across the stack.
- Quality. Own the quality bar for what ships. QA is led by a QA team lead who runs day-to-day testing, regression coverage, and team coordination, and he reports to you — but without a senior QA manager above them, you own QA strategy and test-coverage standards directly. Your job is to set those standards, hold the line on quality under delivery pressure, and own the root-cause-analysis process and its communication, partnering with the Principal Architect on the deep technical diagnosis.
- Customer-facing engineering. Own new-client data migrations end-to-end (tooling, rollback planning, customer communication through cutover) and the integrations program in operation — partner management, monitoring, and incident response — building on the integrations framework the Architect designs.
- Engineering as a business function. Own the engineering budget, software licenses and vendor contracts, API lifecycle operations (versioning, deprecation, external documentation, infra cost), and developer-productivity tooling — and represent Engineering to Product, Finance, and the Board.
What We're Looking For
Must-haves
- 5+ years as a hands-on individual-contributor engineer, followed by 3–5+ years as an Engineering Manager or equivalent managing 15+ engineers — with sustained tenure in each role rather than a pattern of short stints.
- You've owned end-to-end delivery and people for an engineering org at a B2B SaaS company with a large external user base including holding Tech Leads accountable to the roadmap and technical plan.
- Deep, hands-on ownership of production infrastructure and operations at scale — 5+ years building or leading a complex SaaS application with a large external user base, with direct accountability for reliability, scalability, incident management and on-call, capacity planning, and operational excellence on a live production SaaS. You've held the pager, not just the org chart.
- You are a genuinely strong technical engineer — sufficiently fluent in cloud-infrastructure fundamentals, modern technical architecture, data modeling, scaling, security, and optimization to make system, data, and security architecture decisions yourself (our stack: Node.js/TypeScript/NestJS, React, MySQL/Aurora). You can point to specific high-impact technical decisions you've made and defend the trade-offs behind them.
You have led SDLC and you’re an innovative, hands-on adopter of AI coding tools who’s excited to drive an AI-native development transformation and continuously push boundaries.
- Proven people leadership: hiring, leveling, performance management, and building accountability — including directly managing Tech Leads or Engineering Managers, and comfort working directly with both DevOps and a QA Lead.
- Comfortable being the face of engineering: representing technology to Monument's board, investors, and customers with the same fluency you bring to your own team.
- Has directly managed a QA function — or can point to specific examples of driving quality initiatives. Can articulate a long-term QA strategy for a fast-growing SaaS platform at Monument's scale, or can point to specific examples of driving quality initiatives in past experience.
- If you are based in Brazil, professionally fluent in English, able to travel to the US as needed, and partnering daily with a US (Dallas) leadership team across time zones.
Nice-to-haves
- Vertical SaaS or operations-heavy, multi-tenant/portfolio software experience (payments or fintech a plus, given our payments and GAAP-accounting surface).
- Experience running large data migrations and integration ecosystems.
- Built or scaled QA and DevOps functions.
- Experience leading a distributed Brazil↔US engineering team.
Tech Environment
- Stack: Node.js + TypeScript (NestJS) backend, React frontend, AWS Aurora (MySQL), all on AWS.
- Team: ~30 engineers, primarily in Brazil, spanning Tech Leads, DevOps, and a QA function led by a capable QA Manager. The org is well-staffed, productive, and operating well — you're inheriting a working machine, not a rebuild.
- Architecture: A dedicated Principal Architect reports to you and owns system/data/security and client-facing AI architecture.
- Stage of infra: Production SaaS at Series A scale, currently supporting operators with portfolios from a few facilities to 100+ locations.
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