CTO

The Almighty Jatheon CTO

Jatheon Technologies is a global leader in email, social and telephony archiving systems and solutions. With the deployment options of on-premise, virtual and the cloud, Jatheon systems can be deployed in any size organization and satisfy any legal and compliance requirements.

We are looking for an experienced CTO that can help us maintain and scale all three product lines, manage an experienced development team and provide technical vision for the future.

There are three distinct products in Jatheon that you must have some experience with:

• On-Premise Appliances built on the Supermicro platform running Linux with ZFS and supporting the Java, Elasticsearch and Postgres application that is capable of archiving and searching hundreds of millions of emails.
• On-Premise Virtual Appliances that are based on the appliance technology and can be deployed on VMware and other virtualization solutions.
• Cloud Solution running on AWS using modern microservices infrastructure, with Java and Elasticsearch serving as the backbone running on Kubernetes; capable of archiving and searching an ungodly amount of data.

These solutions are designed and built by a full development team of 12 engineers including a PO, Scrum Master, Product Designer, Systems Engineers, SRE and Application engineers. We also have a full Support Team handling client support and monitoring.

You will be working directly with the CEO and the Management team. Your role is to act as both a technology and business expert and make decisions that will impact the current and future product vision.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• We like to be a lot more precise about every position than your usual yada yada, so here are the exact use cases we expect our CTO to perform amazingly well:

Daily

• Attend daily application development team Scrum meetings for updates and to determine any roadblocks. Devise a plan to address roadblocks and help the team deliver on their commitments to keep development on the agreed schedule.
• Advise and mentor team members continuously and strive to improve teamwork and the performance of the entire team so that everyone learns something new every day.
• Review sprint velocity to date in Jira and investigate any and all points of contention, confusion or any other inefficiency. Address issues with the appropriate team members to eliminate delays and confusion and consistently run minimum 85% velocity.
• Meet with the system development team and get an update on system, infrastructure or hardware projects, progress and milestones. Provide feedback and decisions where necessary to deliver at least one project per sprint.
• Review Slack channels and respond to various channels and threads you were tagged in. Answer questions, provide guidance and make decisions to move the projects forward. Who doesn’t love a good notification?
• Consult various infrastructure monitoring and alerting systems to assure smooth operation of the internal and production infrastructure so we don’t have downtime (which will likely happen in the middle of the night and which you and your team have to fix).

Weekly

• Have a meeting with the PO about the backlog refinement, provide technical expertise, review stories for technical accuracy and feasibility and provide appropriate feedback in order for the PO to prioritize effectively.
• Stay on top of designs and attend the PO – Product Designer meetings to provide feedback and raise potential concerns for the planned features.
• Review SRE reports and meet with the SRE team about infrastructure suggestions. Decide the best way to optimize AWS costs, increase system security, improve uptime or increase performance. Provide clear decisions to SRE and automate at least one process per sprint.
• Meet with the Support Team Lead and assess documentation gaps, issue resolution issues, escalations of importance. Schedule and carry out training and knowledge transfer to Support to minimize the occurrence of common issues.
• Keep up on the latest storage and search technology. Work with CSM and PO and pay attention to competitors and adjacent markets and continuously refine the vision for our products.
• Meet with the Management team and act as a technology expert. Provide timelines and milestones on features under development, address questions, coordinate releases with marketing and support and translate business requirements from Sales and Marketing into product vision.

Monthly

• Hit the deadlines you set on the projects and in the sprint. Maintain velocity of the team. Communicate delays, if any, and figure out how to get back on track and hit the milestones that your team estimated.
• Perform performance reviews, 360 reviews (every 6 months) and other team management tasks with everyone on the team. Address their concerns and provide solutions to their conflicts and problems to keep high morale.
• Manage the technology budget including salaries and systems expenses. Create projections and plans for various projects and work with Management to implement improvements.

Quarterly

• Develop and maintain the Engineering Roadmap outlining the technology strategy for one to three years. Monitor and report on decided KPIs and budget to assess technological performance and stay on budget every quarter.
• Attend the management retreat and communicate technology strategy to stakeholders. Use feedback from stakeholders in making necessary technological improvements and adjustments.
• Decide and set performance expectations and benchmarks. Perform consistent personnel performance analysis of the whole technology team. Address performance deficit, increase performance visibility and report on metrics.
• Ensure that technology teams and systems/infrastructure are in line with the company’s greater business strategy. Plan and execute the necessary changes.

REQUIREMENTS

• You have to have some proven experience as a CTO or in a similar leadership role managing at least 20 people or $1M in budget. We are too small and time constrained to train from scratch.
• We are a technology centric company so understanding technology via BSc/BA in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field is required. MBA or other relevant graduate degree is a plus, but don’t expect to impress us with it. We prefer you are a team player and know what you’re doing over a piece of paper.
• On a long enough timeline AWS will bankrupt us all. Understanding how to manage AWS costs in painful detail is a necessity.
• This is as much a leadership position as it is a technical position. Excellent communication and team management skills trump technical skill. You can’t do it all, alone.
• That being said, occasionally it’s best to do it alone. Know when to get your hands dirty on a project and when to delegate. To ace it in this role, you’ve got to know how to think strategically, plan, organize work and delegate to get it done.
• To be effective in general you have to like what you do. On top of that, for this position, you must have a problem-solving aptitude. Good news is that we have plenty of interesting problems to solve.
• Anything can be built (given enough money and time). We don’t have unlimited amounts here though. You need to be able to conduct technical analysis and research, understand budgeting and business-planning and not bankrupt the company with resource demands. Just saying.

FINALLY, SOME PERKS TO LIGHTEN UP THE MOOD

Jatheon is a fully remote organization and a registered Serbian company. We offer private health benefits, flexible working hours, a competitive salary, unforgettable gatherings (well, once the 2020 plague is over), challenging problems to solve and much more.

But we also expect and require commitment and dedication. Jatheon does things differently in many respects, all for the better (we think). We are a team of great people and brilliant developers, so we expect team players who will help us fight a good fight. Ready?

If you think we'd be a good fit, please send us a cover letter and resume in English.

Deadline for applications: 25.10.2020.