Interim Chief Technology Officer

• Own technical hiring, onboarding, performance reviews and offboarding, including access provisioning and removal. Build a management layer as the team grows.
• Know each engineer’s strengths, gaps and output; set clear expectations and run regular 1:1s and targeted coaching.
• Set team goals and OKRs, track delivery and productivity metrics, balance workloads to capacity, and clear blockers quickly.
• Partner with the CEO, COO and business leaders; translate technical tradeoffs into cost, revenue and timeline terms.
• Explain products, data and algorithms in plain language to executives, partners, attorneys and customers.
• Report to the CEO on system health, incidents and their resolution, and technical risk., * Own the technical architecture and roadmap across our core platform (V5), checkout service, consumer sites, APIs, teasers and CMS.
• Lead framework modernization, including planning and executing migrations between PHP frameworks (Yii and Laravel) and migrations of live customer data and services such as authentication and checkout, without disrupting revenue.
• Oversee our data layer, including a large-scale MongoDB environment alongside MySQL: performance, scaling, integrity and cost.
• Evaluate new technologies, data vendors and contracts for value, cost and fit, and find savings in infrastructure and third-party services.
• Drive adoption of AI-assisted development and automation where it improves speed and quality.
• Set standards for code quality, documentation, version control (Git), CI/CD and technical task and epic creation.

Security, Compliance & Operations

• Maintain PCI DSS compliance and SOC 2, and own audit readiness.
• Manage all servers, environments and administrators, including cloud systems (AWS, Google Cloud, Google Workspace, Atlassian).
• Own security infrastructure: firewalls, VPNs, vulnerability scanning, endpoint security and alerting.
• Ensure uptime and reliability of revenue-critical systems; lead incident response and post-incident fixes.
• Enforce technical and security standards across all personnel, not only engineering.

• 7+ years of in-depth, object-oriented PHP development, with hands-on expertise in both Laravel and Yii/Yii2.
• Proven experience leading a migration from one PHP framework to another in production, plus replatforming of live, customer-facing systems at scale.
• Expert-level technical architecture skills: system design, APIs (REST, JSON/XML), scalability and performance.
• Experience managing a large MongoDB deployment; strong MySQL skills.
• 5+ years leading and scaling engineering teams, including hiring engineering managers, defining performance processes, and managing contractors alongside employees.
• Hands-on experience with AWS and/or Google Cloud, Linux/Ubuntu administration, Git and CI/CD.
• Working knowledge of PCI DSS and SOC 2 and the security controls behind them.
• Clear communicator who can explain technical issues to non-technical executives, partners and attorneys., * Experience with Agile/Scrum and running sprint-based teams.
• Prior CTO or VP Engineering role at a growth-stage or data-driven company.
• Experience with AI-assisted development, LLMs or agentic tooling in production engineering.
• Background in high-volume consumer e-commerce, subscriptions, payments or public records/data businesses.
• Familiarity with FCRA/DPPA or other data privacy regulations.
• Experience managing distributed or offshore teams across time zones.