CTO (Chief Technology Officer) (Fully Remote)
Portainer.io, New Zealand
Job Description
Who are we?
Portainer.io is an independent software company that produces a self-hosted solution/platform for managing software containers, at scale, across any orchestrator and location, be that on Dev laptops, in the DC, in the cloud (any cloud), or at the edge. Our solution is adopted globally, with over 750k monthly users, 1M deployments, and a wide diversity of use cases. We started out as an Open-Source project but morphed into an Open Core company. Portainer still retains its Open-Source core in Portainer Community Edition, but we also offer a fully supported, feature-enhanced, closed-source variant, Portainer Business.
The Portainer solution is opinionated (codified best practices) and is specifically designed with non-expert users/operators in mind. Portainer aims to simplify the deployment to, and operations of, the underlying containerized system. As everyone knows, making things less complex is no easy feat. As a result of our product objective, and that we have a deeply technical product that operates across multiple orchestrators, and use cases, we have a relatively complex engineering overhead.
About the Role
We are looking for a technical leader who lives and breathes Docker/Kubernetes and has a history of developing self-hosted software for enterprises. We are wanting a CTO, but a CTO that knows how to operate in a start-up, and that has the background to guide the engineering team as we scale. The CTO is the architectural authority for the software, and its codebase and is expected to be the most technically competent member of the engineering team. If you don’t know your Kubernetes statefulsets from your deployments, how to configure oAUTH, LDAP, or the in’s and out’s of TLS and reverse proxies, then this likely isn’t the role for you. Equally, if you don’t know how to manage PRs, live in multiple code bases, manage JIRA, or have a great understanding of CI/CD, multi-platform builds, test automation, and how to proactively manage software library dependencies, this isn’t the role for you.
You will lead teams of product managers, developers, and QA testers across multiple time zones. We need someone that is able to manage these three teams (each with their own team leaders), be a natural positive influence, and inspire them to design and engineer a high-quality solution, that our customers love. We should live and breathe our own product, so you should be an avid user of the product yourself. Most importantly, we need someone that owns engineering, in that they take accountability and responsibility for building an awesome engineering team, with a vibrant culture, and that wants the best for our customers. Sometimes it’s too easy to forget about the end users of our product when we get tied up in engineering. Equally, we need to balance engineering excellence with product velocity and commercial viability, so we need a CTO that understands that we are building a product that is for sale. There is no point in having the perfect product that is overtaken in the market by more nimble new entrants. Our market continues to evolve rapidly, and we need to exist within this market. This requires us to have an engineering culture that is dynamic, and understands we need to adapt to a constantly evolving and maturing market.
You will often be exposed to our customers and our open-source community, so a willingness to speak (directly, and via social channels) to our users is a must. You should want to know how they use our product, what they love, what they don’t, and what they think is missing. You should know how to triage/replicate customer-reported issues to be able to understand the pain points the users are having with the software. You should care deeply about creating an awesome product that our nearly 800k users love.
We invest heavily in marketing, and as a result, are often on stage presenting at events. You should be willing and able to present our product to a technical audience and explain our value proposition in a language they understand. This may require international travel, so you should be able to accommodate this. You need to be comfortable being seen as the technical spokesperson for the product, as you will be called on by both our success team and the marketing team.
The majority of our product and engineering team is based in Auckland New Zealand, but we also have engineering in France, Israel, and South America. Whilst engineering is in these countries, the vast majority of our customers (and our sales staff) exist in the USA and Europe. We are open to applicants from any time zone that allows active collaboration with our team and our customers.
Responsibilities:
- Help set the vision for technology development and growth, ensuring that the technological resources meet the short and long-term needs of the business.
- Provide leadership with an appetit