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Portugal
Remote only
This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Chief Technology Officer based in Portugal.
This is a hands-on C-level technology leadership role focused on transforming a SaaS engineering organization into a high-velocity, product-focused team.
You will own the technology vision, engineering strategy, R&D budget, technical direction, and infrastructure roadmap.
The role combines deep technical leadership with business strategy, people development, security, and operational excellence.
You’ll lead a small, senior engineering team while remaining close enough to the work to contribute directly when needed.
A major focus will be embedding AI-assisted development practices and building sustainable improvements in engineering productivity.
You’ll oversee large-scale distributed infrastructure, Kubernetes, DevOps, security, compliance, and cost optimization.
Working closely with executives, product leaders, customers, and the board, you’ll help shape how technology drives long-term business and customer value.
Own the overall technology vision, roadmap, and engineering strategy, ensuring technical priorities remain closely aligned with business objectives and customer value.
Lead the transformation toward a high-velocity, product-focused engineering organization that consistently delivers valuable features and improvements.
Introduce and scale AI-assisted development tools and practices, establishing appropriate quality standards, review processes, and responsible usage across engineering workflows.
Own architecture and infrastructure decisions with a holistic approach to total cost of ownership, balancing hosting costs, maintenance requirements, technical debt, and engineering opportunity costs.
Oversee a multi-region, Kubernetes-based production environment, maintaining high standards for reliability, operational hygiene, performance, and cost efficiency.
Monitor and optimize infrastructure economics, including unit costs and cost per render, while maintaining the reliability and scalability required by a high-volume SaaS platform.
Maintain high standards across software quality, performance, security, scalability, and reliability.
Track emerging technologies and changes in engineering practices, identifying innovations that can meaningfully improve how products are built and delivered.
Represent the technology organization with customers, partners, executives, board members, and other external stakeholders.
Own security and compliance as an ongoing operational program, including maintaining certification readiness, audit processes, ownership structures, and organizational resilience.
Guide and mentor engineers, establish clear expectations, support career development, and foster a culture of ownership, accountability, diversity, and inclusion.
Build an environment where engineers take responsibility for their technical decisions and continuously identify and resolve delivery bottlenecks.
Own the continuous improvement cycle for engineering delivery, using measurable outcomes to identify constraints and improve development speed over time.
Strengthen DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, observability, monitoring, and operational processes.
Define meaningful engineering metrics and use data to improve workflows, delivery performance, infrastructure efficiency, and team effectiveness.
Lead organizational and technical changes thoughtfully, ensuring affected teams and customers receive appropriate communication, context, and opportunities to raise concerns before changes are implemented.
Partner with the CEO and broader leadership team on company strategy and communicate technology progress, priorities, risks, and investments to executive and board-level stakeholders.
Collaborate closely with Product to align engineering capacity and priorities with customer needs and commercial objectives.
Translate complex technical concepts into clear business language and advocate for technology investments that support growth and customer value.
Own the complete R&D budget, including personnel, infrastructure, tooling, vendors, and other technology-related investments.
Maintain accurate infrastructure cost models and forecasts, monitor actual spending against plans, and understand the financial implications of major technical decisions.
Operate with a high degree of autonomy, making sound engineering decisions without unnecessary micromanagement while remaining aligned with company strategy.
10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 5+ years in senior engineering leadership positions such as VP Engineering, Director of Engineering, or CTO within a SaaS environment.
Strong infrastructure expertise, including experience operating large-scale distributed systems and production Kubernetes environments.
Demonstrated ability to make strategic tradeoffs between infrastructure costs, maintenance burden, technical quality, and engineering velocity.
Experience managing and optimizing infrastructure unit economics for a production platform or comparable large-scale system.
Proven ability to introduce AI tooling into engineering workflows and meaningfully improve team productivity while maintaining appropriate standards for quality, security, review, and reliability.
Demonstrated experience transforming engineering teams and establishing improvements in delivery speed that remain sustainable beyond an initial transformation period.
Strong track record of implementing new engineering processes, platforms, or ways of working and successfully bringing the affected teams along through the change.
Experience owning or leading an ongoing SaaS security and compliance program, with exposure to SOC 2, ISO 27001, or an equivalent framework.
Strong understanding of scalable, high-performance web products, CI/CD, DevOps, cloud infrastructure, observability, and modern security principles.
Business-oriented mindset with the ability to connect engineering decisions to revenue, customer outcomes, operational efficiency, and broader business strategy.
Hands-on approach to technical leadership, with the ability and willingness to contribute directly alongside engineering teams rather than operating exclusively at a strategic distance.
Experience coaching, mentoring, and developing senior engineering talent, ideally during a significant organizational or technical transformation.
Excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills, including confidence working with executives, boards, customers, and cross-functional teams.
Ability to explain complex technical topics clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
Strong written communication skills and comfort working in an async-first remote environment, with a focus on clear documentation, timely updates, and proactive context-sharing.
Experience working in remote-first or distributed teams is valuable.
Experience with SEO, search technology, web crawling, or related domains is a plus.
100% remote working model with the flexibility to work from wherever you are based within the supported European locations.
High degree of autonomy and ownership within a high-trust environment.
C-level position with a seat at the executive table, direct influence over technology strategy, and visibility at board level.
Significant opportunity to transform engineering practices, product development, infrastructure, and technology operations.
Flexible working approach designed to support asynchronous collaboration and sustainable productivity.
Low-bureaucracy environment focused on maintaining momentum and avoiding unnecessary meetings.
Opportunity to work closely with a small, experienced, and collaborative engineering team.
Access to a broader international SaaS professional community for knowledge sharing, collaboration, and networking.
Flexible time off to support sustainable performance and personal wellbeing.
Generous learning and development budget covering courses, conferences, books, and other professional resources.
Location-adjusted compensation designed around local market conditions for a remote-first environment.
Salary expectations are discussed transparently during the recruitment process and shared in writing before the first interview.
Opportunity to work at the intersection of SaaS, AI-assisted engineering, distributed systems, infrastructure, and product innovation.