Chief Technology Office

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Full Time Senior Management Overland Park, KS, US

6 days ago Requisition ID: 1206

Competitive Compensation & Benefits Package * 401(k) with Profit Sharing * Flexible Time Off * Office Dog!!

ABOUT US

By combining our unparalleled domain expertise with leading-edge technology, Ad Astra is helping higher education in its mission to advance timely student completions. We are building a cloud-based software platform that will provide the foundation for our next generation of industry-leading solutions and analytics. Simply put, we're helping students graduate faster.

OUR CORE VALUES

• We recognize talent. We recognize and appreciate the unique God-given talents that our people bring to Ad Astra. Aligning these individual gifts with our work sets team members up to succeed.
• We’re unpretentious. There’s no room for ego. We admit our imperfections and have the humility to know what we don’t know.
• We’re passionate. We aren’t satisfied with the status quo. We’re on a mission together to protect the value of degree completion and to transform the higher education industry.
• We’re pioneering. We’re pioneering and aren’t afraid of failing—in fact, we celebrate it. We love it when our people boldly experiment with innovative solutions.
• We love fun. The health of our relationships is strengthened by working with people who stretch our thinking—and by enjoying the lighter side of life together. We don’t take ourselves too seriously, but we do take fun seriously.
• We have grit. Beyond talent and intelligence, our people have stick-to-itiveness. We push through challenges to make goals a reality.

POSITION SUMMARY

The Chief Technology Officer is responsible for setting and executing the company’s technology vision, owning the full engineering and platform stack, and ensuring that technology decisions directly accelerate business outcomes, product innovation, and go to market performance. The CTO reports to the Chief Executive Officer and leads a team of 50 or more across software engineering, data integrations, infrastructure and Cloud, and testing. The CTO is a senior executive partner who thinks commercially, communicates transparently, and builds world class teams.

The CTO will be a key contributor to company strategy, client success, and Strategic Partner relations, and will represent engineering at the executive level. The right candidate combines deep technical depth with sharp business acumen, understands the unique dynamics of higher education institutions, and has a demonstrated record of building and scaling SaaS platforms in a high growth environment.

Additionally, the CTO will work with other parts of the organization in cross-company initiatives, such as corporate security, AI transformation, and corporate policy governance. He/she will have high levels of passion, intellect, drive, and energy and will be a self-confident, team-oriented individual with strong ethics and integrity.

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS / CORE RESPONSIBILITIES

Strategic Planning and Vision

The CTO shapes and champions the technology strategy that powers Ad Astra’s mission, product evolution, and competitive differentiation in the higher education market.

• Develop and own a multi-year technology vision, strategy, and roadmap that is tightly aligned with the company’s go to market strategy, product portfolio goals, and growth objectives.
• Serve as a strategic adviser to the CEO and executive leadership team on all technology investment decisions, platform evolution, and technical risk management.
• Partner with Product leadership to adopt and operate within the Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG) product model, ensuring engineering functions as a full partner in discovery and delivery rather than a downstream only execution organization.
• Lead and communicate a platform consolidation roadmap that reduces architectural complexity, accelerates outcome velocity, and reduces total cost of ownership.
• Define and govern the strategy for integrating external institutional systems into the Ad Astra platform, including Student Information Systems, Learning Management Systems, ERP platforms, and scheduling tools prevalent in higher education environments.
• Establish technology governance frameworks including IP protection protocols, data stewardship standards, and regulatory compliance postures aligned to higher education requirements.
• Develop and manage the annual technology budget for capital and operating expenditures; ensure effective allocation of engineering resources against strategic priorities.
• Represent the technology organization at the Board level, providing regular updates on strategic initiatives, platform health, and engineering performance metrics.
• Monitor competitive landscape and emerging technology trends in higher education SaaS, translating insights into proactive strategic recommendations.
• Build scalable architecture standards that will support inorganic growth
• Lead technical due diligence on acquisition targets, including architecture assessment, technical debt review, security posture and platform integration feasibility and provide technical input related to acquisition valuations, integration timelines and costs-to-integrate.
• Lead post-acquisition integration work including defining standards for platform integration, data migration, API harmonization and team integration

The CTO builds and sustains a high performing engineering organization rooted in accountability, psychological safety, and a culture of continuous improvement.

• Recruit, develop, and retain exceptional engineering talent across software development, data engineering, infrastructure, DevOps, and AI disciplines.
• Build and evolve an organizational structure that enables both rapid product delivery and long-term platform quality, including clear career ladders and progression frameworks.
• Foster a culture of innovation, transparency, and accountability across all levels of the engineering organization.
• Establish and communicate clear team and individual goals; provide ongoing coaching and performance feedback to engineering managers and senior individual contributors.
• Develop an organizational model that delivers effective services to both internal stakeholders (Product, Sales, Customer Success, Finance) and external customers, including institutional partners.
• Champion engineering culture externally through thought leadership, conference participation, and recruiting brand initiatives that position Ad Astra as a destination for top technical talent.
• Lead change management processes that ensure stability and reliability as the organization scales, modernizes infrastructure, and introduces new product capabilities.

Software Development

The CTO owns the engineering processes, quality standards, and delivery mechanisms that power Ad Astra’s SaaS platform. The CTO drives a modern, discipline-driven software development lifecycle grounded in Agile principles and SVPG product practices.

• Design and sustain effective software development lifecycle (SDLC) processes that support distributed, multi-location development teams working across the full product portfolio.
• Champion and implement Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) practices across all engineering teams, ensuring automated build, test, and deployment pipelines are standard operating procedures for every product and service.
• Embed automated testing, code quality gates, and security scanning directly into CI/CD pipelines, reducing defect escape rates and enabling confident, frequent releases.
• Promote Agile development methodology across all teams, with a focus on iterative delivery, short feedback loops, and outcome-oriented team charters aligned to product strategy.
• Drive continuous improvement of SDLC maturity using empirical analysis of team velocity, defect density, deployment frequency, and change failure rates, with reference to Capability Maturity Model (CMM) frameworks where applicable.
• Establish and enforce architectural review processes for key platform decisions; ensure proper documentation, design review, and trade off analysis precede major technical choices.
• Monitor product roadmap adherence and delivery commitments; proactively identify risks and make resourcing and scope adjustments to maintain delivery integrity.
• Build scalable processes for technical debt management, ensuring the organization maintains a healthy balance between velocity and platform sustainability.
• Work directly with key customers and institutional partners, as appropriate, to communicate engineering progress, resolve critical issues, and build long term technical trust.

Artificial Intelligence, Data, and Analytics

The CTO leads Ad Astra’s evolution as an AI enabled, data driven platform company, ensuring that data architecture, data science capability, and AI strategy are first class investments deeply integrated into the product roadmap and business strategy.

• Own and evolve the company’s enterprise AI strategy, encompassing product embedded AI features, internal productivity applications, and the responsible governance of AI model use, data usage policies, and model training restrictions in compliance with client contractual obligations.
• Lead the development of a modern cloud native data platform on AWS enabling reliable, governed, and scalable data infrastructure that powers both product capabilities and internal business intelligence.
• Build and oversee a Data Engineering practice responsible for robust data pipelines, data integration architecture, and interoperability between Ad Astra systems and third-party institutional platforms (SIS, ERP, LMS, scheduling, and financial aid systems).
• Drive the adoption of data science and machine learning capabilities to enhance core product value propositions, including predictive analytics for student success, enrollment forecasting, scheduling optimization, and institutional performance benchmarking.
• Champion a data informed engineering culture in which team performance, product decisions, and client outcomes are measured and improved through rigorous use of data rather than intuition alone.
• Evaluate and adopt emerging AI frameworks, large language model integrations, and agentic automation technologies in a disciplined, commercially focused manner that creates defensible product differentiation.
• Represent Ad Astra’s AI and data practices with clients, prospects, and institutional partners, building confidence in the company’s approach to responsible AI use and data privacy.
• Lead the enterprise AI transformation strategies to evolve internal productivity through greater adoption and implementation of value creating AI centered around human in the loop principles.

Infrastructure & Security

The CTO is accountable for a resilient, scalable, and secure cloud infrastructure that meets the reliability expectations of higher education institutions and the compliance requirements of regulated data environments.

• Own the cloud infrastructure strategy on Amazon Web Services (AWS), including architecture standards, service selection, environment management, and cost optimization disciplines.
• Lead the design and implementation of scalable, highly available, and fault tolerant cloud architectures that support SaaS multi tenancy, institutional data isolation, and performance at scale.
• Establish and mature a comprehensive Information Security program aligned to NIST, SOC 2 Type II, and higher education specific compliance frameworks including TxRAMP and FedRAMP aligned expectations.
• Integrate security practices into the CI/CD pipeline through a DevSecOps approach, including automated vulnerability scanning, dependency analysis, secrets management, and infrastructure as code validation.
• Establish and enforce data governance standards including data ownership, quality SLAs, access controls, privacy compliance (FERPA, CCPA, etc.), and audit trails across the full data estate.
• Ensure all client data handling practices comply with FERPA, CCPA, state privacy laws, and applicable federal regulations; conduct annual compliance assessments and third-party audits.
• Build and maintain a Security Incident Response capability including detection, containment, and communication protocols; conduct regular tabletop exercises and penetration testing.
• Oversee vendor and technology partner risk management, including evaluation of SaaS tools, open-source dependencies, and AI model providers against security and privacy standards.
• Manage infrastructure costs with disciplined FinOps practices, balancing reliability, performance, and cost efficiency as the platform scales.

POSITION REQUIREMENTS

• Minimum of 15 years of progressive technology experience, with at least 10 years leading engineering organizations within B2B SaaS companies serving mid-market or enterprise clients.
• Demonstrated success as a CTO or VP of Engineering in a SaaS company with a track record of building and scaling cloud native platforms from early stage through growth and maturity.
• Experience in the higher education technology sector preferred, with working knowledge of institutional workflows, data systems, and the regulatory environment governing student data.
• Proven experience building and evolving AI and machine learning capabilities within a product organization, including responsible AI governance and client facing AI capability delivery.
• Strong background in data engineering, data integration architecture, and enterprise data platform design using modern cloud data tools.
• Experience operating within or alongside a private equity-backed environment, with an understanding of the performance expectations, operational cadence, and value creation priorities of PE ownership.

HOW PERFORMANCE IS MEASURED FOR THIS ROLE

The CTO’s performance will be evaluated against the following dimensions on a cadence agreed with the CEO:

• Platform Velocity and Quality: Deployment frequency, change failure rate, mean time to recovery (MTTR), and reduction of critical production incidents measured quarter over quarter.
• CI/CD Maturity: Percentage of services with fully automated build, test, and deployment pipelines; lead time from code commit to production release.
• AI and Data Platform Progress: Adoption of AI features by customers, data platform reliability SLAs, and measurable improvement in data integration coverage across institutional partner systems.
• Engineering Organizational Health: Employee engagement scores, voluntary attrition rates, and time to fill for key engineering roles.
• Strategic Alignment: Percentage of engineering investment aligned to company OKRs and go to market priorities; quality and frequency of Board level technology reporting.
• Security and Compliance Posture: SOC 2 audit outcomes, security incident avoidance and metrics, and progress toward GDPR, FedRAMP, and other aligned compliance objectives.
• Budget Performance: Engineering spend vs. plan; measurable improvement in cloud infrastructure cost efficiency as a percentage of revenue.
• Client Impact: SLA uptime standards, data pipeline reliability, bi-directional integration quality, and AI feature adoption among institutional clients.

This position is an in-office role in Overland Park, KS in the greater Kansas City metro area. Ad Astra does not cover relocation expenses.

Ad Astra is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to fostering an inclusive workplace where all individuals are treated with respect and fairness—regardless of race, color, national origin, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, religion, age, political affiliation, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

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