Chief Technology Officer - CTO - SaaS EdTech

You will lead a technology function of approximately eight people, providing the technical leadership and direction required to deliver an ambitious product and platform roadmap.

While you will contribute to longer-term technology strategy, the immediate priority is execution. Over the first 12 to 18 months, you will remain close to the technology, engineering team and delivery challenges, creating the technical environment and ways of working that enable the team to move faster and deliver at greater scale.

AI will be central to this mandate. The ambition extends beyond incremental productivity gains. The business wants to explore how autonomous agents and emerging AI capabilities can take on substantial elements of software development, creating significantly greater engineering capacity without relying on substantial headcount growth.

Key priorities will include:

• Lead delivery of the technology roadmap, supporting significant growth in the product portfolio.
• Embed AI coding agents and AI-enabled engineering practices across the software development lifecycle.
• Create an engineering model capable of significantly increasing output and development velocity with a lean team.
• Provide strong technical leadership, remaining close enough to the code, architecture and development process to challenge and guide technical decisions.
• Lead the evolution and, where appropriate, rebuilding of existing platforms using pragmatic, modern engineering approaches.
• Strengthen testing, release management, engineering quality and development practices.
• Simplify and optimise complex customer integrations and onboarding.
• Ensure platforms remain scalable, secure and resilient as customer and product volumes increase.
• Build a culture of experimentation where emerging AI development tools are evaluated quickly and adopted where they create meaningful value.
• Work closely with the Founders and leadership team, translating commercial priorities into technology delivery.

You will be comfortable in an entrepreneurial environment where pace, experimentation and technical judgement matter. Rather than defaulting to larger teams as demand increases, you will be interested in how technology, tooling and new ways of working can unlock significantly greater capacity from a highly capable engineering function.

You will ideally bring:

• Strong technical depth and credibility, ideally with a background in PHP and modern web application development.
• Experience leading engineering within a start-up, scale-up, SaaS or similarly entrepreneurial technology environment.
• A track record of remaining close to architecture, engineering and software delivery while operating in a senior leadership role.
• Practical experience using AI coding tools, autonomous agents or AI-assisted software development, with a strong perspective on how these technologies can improve engineering.
• Evidence of improving engineering productivity, development velocity and delivery capacity.
• Experience building, rebuilding or significantly evolving software platforms.
• Experience of SaaS, complex integrations or software-led products.
• Strong commercial judgement and the ability to translate business priorities into pragmatic technical decisions.
• The ability to lead and develop a small engineering team while creating a culture of ownership, pace and continuous experimentation.

Experience within a private equity-backed environment would be beneficial but is not essential. Technical depth, delivery capability, entrepreneurial thinking and a progressive approach to AI-enabled engineering are more important.

• Competitive base salary plus bonus plus sweet equity
• Hybrid working

The Opportunity

This is not a traditional CTO role centred primarily on strategy, governance or building a large technology organisation.

The initial mandate is deliberately delivery-led. You will have the opportunity to explore how advances in AI can change the economics and productivity of software engineering while helping a growing technology business significantly expand its product portfolio.

For a CTO who wants to be at the forefront of how software engineering is changing, this is an opportunity to turn that thinking into practice, building a lean, highly productive engineering function capable of delivering at significantly greater scale.Process

The process will begin with a confidential conversation with our Research team, followed by a meeting with the search lead.

Our client is a high-growth EdTech business based in Yorkshire, with approximately 70 employees and ambitious plans to scale over the next three years.

Technology is central to that ambition. The business currently has around 40 products across its B2B and B2C markets, with plans to expand this to more than 200 as its customer base and proposition grow.

Rather than achieving this by significantly increasing the size of its technology function, the business wants to challenge traditional software development models. Its ambition is to use AI, autonomous agents and emerging development tools to fundamentally improve how software is built, tested and delivered.

For an ambitious, technically strong CTO, this is an opportunity to shape a modern engineering model and demonstrate what a small, highly capable team can achieve when AI is embedded throughout the development lifecycle.