Chief of Staff to the CTO

• This role is a force multiplier for the CTO and the Product, Engineering, and Implementation leadership team. You operate as an extension of the CTO, absorbing context across every workstream, making prioritization calls, wielding authority, and running the operating system of a technical org that ships to commercial and government customers around the world
• Beyond execution, you hold the business of the Product/Eng org: its operating cadence, budget, and people planning, in partnership with Finance and the People team. You also build and lead the org’s Program Management Office: a team of technical program managers who run the portfolio of cross-functional programs and customer deliveries
• This is a position of operational ownership and trusted judgment, ensuring the technical functions are aligned with Altana’s business strategy and corporate governance. Where the role touches compensation, leveling, org design, and budget, you apply the frameworks the People CoE and Finance own. You are the CTO’s embedded counterpart to those functions, not a parallel authority
• Lead or staff high-priority critical organizational initiatives identified by EPD leadership
• Own the operating cadence: staff meetings, roadmap planning and portfolio reviews, metrics reviews, and leadership offsites. Set agendas, drive follow-through, and document and distribute decisions
• Build and lead a team of technical program managers. Hire, develop, and set the bar for the function, and decide where TPMs are embedded versus centrally deployed
• Own the portfolio view of in-flight programs and customer deliveries, intake and prioritization, and delivery standards, including planning, status, risk and dependency tracking, launch readiness, and government contract reporting. Own the tooling that makes delivery health visible
• Across the various sub-teams within Product, Engineering, and Implementation, and across public and private sector delivery motions, surface where priorities collide and drive resolution
• Manage decision and information flow: determine what reaches the CTO, in what form, and what gets escalated versus resolved below
• Prepare board and all-hands material and internal updates for the Product/Eng org, grounded in its real state
• With the People CoE, run headcount planning, org design, and leveling and compensation within Product/Eng, applying central frameworks, assessing where the org is over- or under-built, and serving as the CTO’s single counterpart to the People team
• Own the Product/Eng budget and spend against the plan Finance sets. Track burn, flag variance, model headcount and vendor trade-offs, and act as the CTO’s counterpart to FP&A. Own success metrics in partnership with FP&A to ensure tight alignment on business levers to drive growth and deployment of capital

Benefits

• Competitive base salary: We offer competitive base salaries to recognize the incredible work our employees do.
• Learning & development: We support your development through regular performance check-ins and offer financial support for Learning and Development initiatives.
• Health benefits: We offer full global benefits, including a 100% employer-paid plan and tax-advantaged HSA and FSA options in the US.
• Paid time off: We provide a generous PTO policy, including paid sick time, to support your well-being in and out of the office.
• Equity program: We instill ownership by offering competitive new hire equity grants, plus the opportunity to gain more equity along the way.
• Parental leave: We offer up to 26 weeks of fully paid parental leave to support you and your family.

Experience using engineering metrics such as DORA or SPACE to improve how a team worksExperience building production systems with LLMs, agents, evals, or retrievalA record of holding multiple parallel workstreams, competing stakeholders, and ambiguous ownership, and keeping all of it movingExtreme organizational precision—systems legible to others, clean first drafts, and async updates that need minimal editingAround 10 years in product management, technical program or portfolio management, strategy, business operations, or a role with genuine operational ownership—not coordinationFinancial and operational fluency, including managing a budget, speaking to variance, and tackling headcount and spend trade-offsExperience managing and growing a team, ideally program or project managers. You’ve hired, coached, and given hard feedback, and built a function others want to joinComfort with org design and workforce planning as a partner to a People function—fluent enough to be a real thought partner, without running itInfluence beyond your own team: moving engineers, PMs, and GTM leads through trust, framing, and timing, not by invoking the CTO’s nameA background in trade, supply chain, compliance, or working with government customersExperience building or running a PMO or program portfolio, including designing intake, prioritization, and delivery-tracking processes that teams use rather than work aroundExperience delivering programs under government contracts, including milestones, deliverables, and compliance reportingEnough technical fluency to hold a real conversation with a platform engineer about APIs, infrastructure, deployment, and architecture at a conceptual level, and to read and challenge a design doc. Coding experience is not required