Chief Technology Officer (CTO) - Prerender

Core Responsibilities

This role is part of the Prerender team, a dynamic rendering SaaS platform within the saas.group portfolio. Prerender serves over 2.7 billion unique pages to web crawlers, driving results for enterprises and growing businesses.

Technology Vision and Strategy

Technology Vision and Strategy:

• Own the technology vision, roadmap, and engineering strategy for Prerender, aligning engineering work with business objectives and customer value.
• Lead adoption of AI-assisted development tooling to multiply team productivity; own the quality bar for what it produces.
• Drive architecture and infrastructure decisions with a holistic view of TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), including maintenance burden and engineering opportunity cost, not just hosting spend.
• Run a multi-region, Kubernetes-based render fleet efficiently, focusing on cost per render, reliability, and operational hygiene.
• Represent Prerender’s technical capabilities to customers, partners, and the broader market.
• Maintain high standards of software quality, performance, security, and reliability.
• Track shifts in technology and engineering practice, and bring transformative changes into the team.

Security and Compliance

Security and Compliance:

• Own security and compliance as a standing program. Prerender is pursuing SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certification by the end of 2026.
• Keep the program legible to others with named owners, current vendor and auditor contacts, and no single point of failure.

Team Management and Growth

Team Management and Growth:

• Coach and mentor engineers to reach their full potential, setting clear expectations and creating opportunities for growth. People matter here.
• Build a culture of ownership, where engineers carry their decisions through instead of escalating them.
• Foster diversity and inclusion within the engineering organization.

Execution and Delivery

Execution and Delivery:

• Own the continuous improvement motion of delivery, with the team finding and removing its own bottlenecks on a regular cadence.
• Enhance DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and robust monitoring systems.
• Define and track engineering metrics that matter, using data to identify bottlenecks and optimize workflows.
• Manage change deliberately. Changes to practice, process, and infrastructure reach the people who have to run them with notice, consultation, and a route to raise questions before implementation.

Executive Partnership and Stakeholder Management

Executive Partnership and Stakeholder Management:

• Partner with the CEO and leadership team on company strategy, communicating technology progress to company leadership and the board.
• Work closely with Product to align engineering capacity with customer needs.
• Translate technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders and advocate for investments that drive business growth.

Ownership & Autonomy

Ownership & Autonomy:

• Own the full R&D budget, including personnel, infrastructure, tooling, and vendor relationships.
• Run that budget as a managed number. Maintain an infrastructure cost model, report forecast against actual, and be able to say what a decision costs before it’s made.
• Make the right decisions for engineering, aligned with company strategy, without micromanagement.

Qualifications

What You Bring to the Table:

• 10+ years in software engineering, with 5+ years in senior engineering leadership (VP/Director/CTO) at a SaaS company.
• Strong infrastructure background with experience running large-scale distributed systems and production Kubernetes, and making strategic tradeoffs between cost, maintenance burden, and engineering velocity.
• Demonstrated ability to embed AI tooling into engineering workflows and multiply team productivity, with a clear-eyed view of where it helps, where it produces plausible work that doesn’t hold up, and how review standards survive increased volume.
• Proven experience coaching, mentoring, and developing engineering teams, ideally through a significant transformation.
• A track record of raising a team’s delivery speed and keeping it raised long-term, with measurement and process change that made it stick.
• A record of landing process and platform change that sticks, with affected people brought along before implementation.
• Experience owning a security and compliance program in a SaaS company — SOC 2, ISO 27001 or equivalent — as a continuing operational responsibility.
• Business-oriented and hands-on, understanding how engineering decisions connect to revenue and customer value, and contributing directly alongside the team.
• Experience with scalable, high-performance web products, CI/CD, DevOps, and security principles. SEO or search-related experience is a plus.
• Excellent communication skills, comfortable presenting to boards, working with executives, and collaborating cross-functionally.