Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Helpful Engineering: Volunteer Leadership Role

Location: Remote

Reports to: Chief Executive Officer, with accountability to the Board of Directors

Commitment: Volunteer and unpaid. This role requires consistent weekly availability, including attendance at leadership meetings and timely responses to team requests.

Works with: Innovation Labs, Operations, Risk, the Deputy CTO, and volunteer technical leads across project teams

Job Overview

Helpful Engineering is a global, research-based nonprofit that brings together volunteer engineers, scientists, and technologists to develop open-source solutions to systemic challenges in healthcare, supply chain and manufacturing, agriculture, water, energy, and infrastructure.

We are looking for a Chief Technology Officer who will build and lead a responsive volunteer technical team, keep the organization’s technology running, and make sure our research and project teams have the technical resources they need to deliver.

This is a support and enablement role. Our Innovation Labs lead the research and innovation agenda: which problems we take on, how projects are scoped, and what gets built. The CTO does not set that agenda. The CTO partners with Innovation Labs to understand their project needs and ensures the right technical people, tools, and infrastructure are in place to meet them.

Before You Apply

This is our third search for this role, so we want to be direct about what it is and what it is not.

To be successful in this role, you need to recognize two things. First, this is a volunteer position. Second, Helpful Engineering is a research-based organization, not a commercial one. The work is meaningful, but it will not pay you, and it is not a route to paid work.

You’re probably not the right fit if...

• you are looking for this organization to sustain you financially, now or in the future. This role is unpaid and will remain unpaid.
• you are a contractor between engagements hoping this role will generate income, consulting leads, or billable work. It will not.
• you want to lead innovation or set the research direction. That is the role of our Innovation Labs. The CTO partners with them and supports their technical needs.
• you are looking for an advisory, honorary, or title-only role with occasional involvement. This is an active, hands-on leadership role that expects your current, working technical skills.
• you can’t commit to attending leadership meetings or to responding to your team and partners in a timely way.
• you would rather build the technology yourself than build the team that supports it. Your success is measured by the strength and responsiveness of your team.
• you are mainly interested in long-range technology vision and less interested in the day-to-day work of keeping our tech stack running with Operations.

You’re probably the right fit if...

• you are motivated by the mission and have the time and stability to contribute without expecting anything in return.
• you get energy from recruiting, organizing, and developing people, and you take pride in a team that shows up when others need it.
• you are comfortable in a supporting role and see enabling other people’s research as the point of the job.

Core Responsibilities

1. Build and Lead a Responsive Technical Team

• Recruit, onboard, and retain volunteer technical leads and contributors, working with the Deputy CTO to build depth across the team.
• Establish a responsive technical support model with a clear way to request help, prioritize requests, and set expectations for response times.
• Mentor and develop volunteer technical leads so the team can sustain itself as volunteers come and go.
• Track team capacity and close gaps before they become blockers for project teams.

1. Partner with Innovation Labs on Technical Resourcing

• Work alongside Innovation Labs to understand the technical requirements of their research and projects. Innovation Labs leads the projects; the CTO resources and supports them.
• Translate project needs into technical resourcing requirements, including skills, people, tools, and infrastructure.
• Match qualified volunteers to project teams and raise capacity or skill gaps early so they can be addressed.
• Provide technical guidance when asked, without taking over project direction.

1. Maintain the Tech Stack in Partnership with Operations

• Co-own the organization’s technology stack with Operations, including collaboration platforms, cloud services, development tooling, and access management.
• Keep systems documented, secure, and cost-conscious, which is appropriate for a volunteer-run nonprofit.
• Plan for continuity so that critical systems do not depend on any single volunteer.
• Working familiarity with the core technology stack listed in Appendix A.

1. Cross-Functional Planning and Leadership

• Attend leadership meetings and represent the technology function in organizational planning and budgeting.
• Partner with Operations, Innovation Labs, and Risk to anticipate upcoming support needs and build the technical team to meet them.
• Work with Risk on data governance, cybersecurity, privacy, and open-source licensing obligations across volunteer-built systems.
• Keep the CEO and Board informed on technical capacity, risks, and resource needs.

1. Open-Source Standards

• Maintain practical standards for contribution, code quality, documentation, and licensing that support safe, open collaboration across projects.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of progressive experience in software engineering or technology, including 5+ years leading technical teams (for example, as CTO, VP of Engineering, Head of Engineering, or Engineering Manager).
• Current, hands-on technical skills relevant to modern cloud, collaboration, and development environments. We expect you to bring working knowledge, not only past experience.
• A proven record of building and leading teams, ideally distributed, volunteer, or community-driven teams.
• Experience running technical support or IT operations, including service intake, prioritization, and response.
• Experience supporting research, R&D, or engineering project teams is strongly preferred.
• Experience with open-source governance and nonprofit or mission-driven organizations is an asset.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Personal Attributes

• Responsive: You reply, follow through, and are reliably present for your team and peers.
• Team Builder: You are passionate about recruiting and developing people, and you measure success by what your team delivers.
• Partner Mindset: You are comfortable supporting others’ work rather than leading it, and you collaborate well with Operations, Innovation Labs, and Risk.
• Mission-Driven: You care about humanitarian engineering and understand how research-based work differs from commercial delivery.
• Resourceful: You are comfortable working with limited resources and informal structures typical of a volunteer-run nonprofit.

Ready to Apply?

If you have read this far and still see yourself in this role, we want to hear from you. In your application, please tell us:

• how many hours per week you can reliably commit, and when you are typically available;
• an example of a technical team you have built or grown, and how you kept it responsive; and
• why a volunteer role at a research-based organization fits where you are right now.

This is an unpaid volunteer position at a nonprofit organization.

Apply now or learn more about us at: helpfulengineering.org

Appendix A: Core Technology Stack

The CTO will co-own the following platforms with Operations. These are the critical systems the organization depends on day to day.

• AWS
• Google Drive
• Brevo
• SocialBee
• Onshape
• ClayLabs
• Airtable
• Microsoft 365
• 1Password
• Notion
• Namecheap
• Organization website (helpfulengineering.org)
• GitHub

The stack also includes a number of smaller microtools, but the platforms above account for the lion’s share of our technology spend.