Chief Technology Officer

Chief Technology Officer

Remote, Europe

This role is part of our Prerender team, one of our largest brands at saas.group.

Prerender is a dynamic rendering SaaS platform within the saas.group portfolio. Since 2017, we've revolutionized SEO practices by enabling search engines to crawl JavaScript-heavy sites seamlessly while preserving user experience. Thousands of companies worldwide trust our platform, which serves over 2.7 billion unique pages to web crawlers and drives results for enterprises and growing businesses alike.

Profile Overview

Prerender has built a platform that thousands of companies trust to serve billions of pages to web crawlers. Now we're evolving into something bigger: the layer that makes the web legible to machines, both the search crawlers that have always mattered and the AI systems that increasingly decide what people find.

To get there, we need to transform how we build product. We're looking for a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to lead that transformation, shifting our engineering organization from infrastructure-optimization to a high-velocity, product-focused team that moves fast and ships features that matter.

This is a building role, not a caretaker role. You'll own the technology vision, set the engineering strategy, and have authority over the R&D budget, team, and technical direction. You'll embed AI-first engineering practices, make smart infrastructure tradeoffs, and build the improvement motion that makes delivery faster and keeps it that way.

You'll lead a small, senior engineering team — around seven engineers today — supported by shared platform and DevOps resources from saas.group's central team. There is no management layer between you and the engineers, which puts you close to the work and means the leadership has to come from you.

So we need someone hands-on enough to augment the team, not to manage it from a distance, and who can do that without losing hold of the strategy and the responsibilities only this role carries.

We need deep technical expertise, a strong infrastructure background, and a proven track record of transforming engineering teams at SaaS companies.

Your Responsibilities

Technology Vision and Strategy:

• Own the technology vision, roadmap, and engineering strategy for Prerender. Align engineering work with business objectives and customer value.
• Lead adoption of AI-assisted development tooling to multiply team productivity; own the quality bar for what it produces.
• Drive architecture and infrastructure decisions with a holistic view of TCO that includes maintenance burden and engineering opportunity cost, not just hosting spend.
• Run a multi-region, Kubernetes-based render fleet efficiently: cost per render, reliability, and the operational hygiene that keeps both from drifting.
• Represent Prerender's technical capabilities to customers, partners, and the broader market.
• Maintain high standards of software quality, performance, security, and reliability.
• Track shifts in technology and engineering practice, and bring the ones that change how we build into the team.

Security and Compliance:

• Own security and compliance as a standing program. Prerender completes SOC 2 Type II and its ISO 27001 certification decision at the end of 2026; you inherit the year-two observation period, the surveillance audit, and the operational discipline that keeps both credible.
• Keep the program legible to someone other than you: named owners, current vendor and auditor contacts, and no single point of failure.

Team Management and Growth:

• Coach and mentor engineers to reach their full potential. Set clear expectations and create opportunities for growth. People matter here.
• Build a culture of ownership, where engineers carry their decisions through instead of escalating them.
• Foster diversity and inclusion within the engineering organization.

Execution and Delivery:

• Own the continuous improvement motion of delivery. The team finds and removes its own bottlenecks on a regular cadence.
• Enhance DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and robust monitoring systems.
• Define and track engineering metrics that matter. Use data to identify bottlenecks and optimize workflows.
• Manage change deliberately. Changes to practice, process and infrastructure reach the people who have to run them — and, where customers are affected, the customers — with notice, consultation, and a route to raise a question before the change lands.

Executive Partnership and Stakeholder Management:

• Partner with the CEO and leadership team on company strategy. Communicate technology progress to company leadership and the board.
• Work closely with Product to align engineering capacity with customer needs.
• Translate technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders and advocate for investments that drive business growth.

Ownership & Autonomy:

• Own the full R&D budget including personnel, infrastructure, tooling, and vendor relationships.
• Run that budget as a managed number. Maintain an infrastructure cost model, report forecast against actual, and be able to say what a decision costs before it's made.
• Make the right decisions for engineering, aligned with company strategy, without second-guessing or micromanagement.

What You Bring to the Table

• 10+ years in software engineering, with 5+ years in senior engineering leadership (VP/Director/CTO) at a SaaS company.
• Strong infrastructure background with experience running large-scale distributed systems and production Kubernetes, and making strategic tradeoffs between cost, maintenance burden, and engineering velocity. You've driven unit costs down on a fleet you owned.
• Demonstrated ability to embed AI tooling into engineering workflows and multiply team productivity , with a clear-eyed view of where it helps, where it produces plausible work that doesn't hold up, and how review standards survive the increase in volume.
• Proven experience coaching, mentoring, and developing engineering teams, ideally through a significant transformation.
• A track record of raising a team's delivery speed and keeping it raised long after the initial push, with the measurement and process change that made it stick.
• A record of landing process and platform change that sticks, with the people affected brought along before it landed.
• Experience owning a security and compliance program in a SaaS company — SOC 2, ISO 27001 or equivalent — as a continuing operational responsibility.
• Business-oriented and hands-on: you understand how engineering decisions connect to revenue and customer value, and you contribute directly alongside the team, through the same review and planning process as everyone else.
• Experience with scalable, high-performance web products, CI/CD, DevOps, and security principles. SEO or search-related experience is a plus.
• Excellent communication skills. Comfortable presenting to boards, working with executives, and collaborating cross-functionally. Communication is async-first in our remote environment, leaning on clear, timely updates with documentation up-to-date and readable and proactive context-sharing.

What's in it for You

• Ultimate flexibility: We're 100% remote. Work from wherever you like, whenever you like.
• Freedom and autonomy: High-trust environment with lots of independence to solve problems your way, with support when you need it.
• Minimum bureaucracy: We stay efficient and keep momentum sustainable. No death by meetings.
• Real impact: This is a C-level role with a seat at the executive table, board visibility, and the mandate to transform how we build product.
• Small & friendly team: We help each other out, have fun, and don't take ourselves too seriously.
• Our network: Access to a community of SaaS professionals across the saas.group portfolio who regularly exchange ideas and expertise.
• Flexible time off: Recharge when you need to.
• Learning Budget: Generous budget for classes, conferences, books, and other learning resources.

Prerender is part of sa