CTO
Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
Manchester
£90,000-£110,000 (+ good package)
Our client is a purpose-driven B2B SaaS business helping employers build safer, more inclusive environments. Their platform handles sensitive data for organisations where trust, security and genuine outcomes genuinely matter, and they're entering an exciting next stage of growth.
The Role
This is a hands-on, high-impact CTO role not a large-company, committee-led position. You'll provide credible technical leadership, architectural judgement, product direction and people leadership in a small B2B SaaS environment, helping move the company from a founder-led engineering function into a mature, confident product and technology organisation.
This may suit an established CTO looking for more purposeful work, or a Head of Engineering, Technology Director or Principal Architect ready to step into broader leadership.
What You'll Do
• Own and develop the product and technology strategy, aligned to commercial objectives
• Set architectural direction - APIs, integrations, data platform, security, scalability, CI/CD
• Lead a small engineering and product team with empathy and high expectations
• Define a data strategy that puts insight at the heart of the product proposition
• Lead safe, pragmatic AI adoption across product and engineering
• Own security, risk and compliance, making ISO27001 a lived discipline, not just an audit
• Report to the CEO, sit on the Leadership Team and provide clear Board-level visibility
• Support investor, due diligence and senior commercial conversations
The Team & Technical Environment
You'll lead a small, capable team spanning engineering, product management, QA and UX/design. A strong Product Manager handles much of the day-to-day product work; your job is to set direction and ensure strategy aligns with business goals. The team has responded well to clear, calm leadership and honest escalation of risk - the next leader will combine genuine empathy with decisiveness and higher expectations.
On the platform side, the key themes you'll work through include: data and analytics architecture, API and integration strategy, observability, security architecture, CI/CD maturity, scalability and cloud infrastructure. Experience across AWS, modern SaaS architecture and sensitive or regulated data environments is essential.
What We're Looking For
• Senior technology leadership in a small B2B SaaS or scale-up environment
• Strong architectural judgement across cloud-native SaaS, APIs, observability and security
• Experience leading engineering and product teams directly
• A track record of improving delivery confidence and managing technical debt commercially
• The ability to communicate technical trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders
• Experience with sensitive data, regulated environments or compliance obligations
The right person will be decisive but not arrogant, calm under pressure, commercially curious, and technically credible enough to lead a sceptical engineering team - while being comfortable at Board level.
Why Join
This role offers real influence, meaningful work and the chance to shape the next stage of a business whose purpose genuinely matters. You'll have genuine authority, a seat at the Leadership Team table, and the opportunity to make decisions that will define the next five years.
Our client are an equal opportunities employer committed to inclusive recruitment.