CTO
Established Marketplace, $20M ARR, High-End Niche
London | Full-time
Most CTO roles right now are sold on potential. This one is sold on leverage.
A $20M ARR marketplace - category leader in a high-end, niche sector - is hiring a CTO. The business is profitable, established, and has built something genuinely defensible. What it hasn't done yet is reset its technical operating model for what the last 18 months in AI and tooling have made possible.
That's the job.
What's actually on the table
You're not being hired to write a three-year transformation deck. You're being hired because the founders have looked at their cost base, their velocity, and their roadmap, and concluded that a CTO who deeply understands how modern AI-native teams ship - and who can show their existing team how to work that way - can unlock a step-change in efficiency and output. Not 20%. Closer to 10x in the areas where it matters.
That means:
- Rebuilding engineering workflows around the tools that are genuinely moving the needle right now (not the ones that were on a keynote slide 12 months ago)
- Getting hands-on with the team - pairing, reviewing, showing not telling - so capability transfers, not just intent
- Rethinking which problems should be solved by humans, which by AI, and which shouldn't be solved at all
- Owning the technical delivery of a business that already has product-market fit, paying customers, and room to move
Who this will actually suit
Someone who has led engineering before and wants to do it again with a radically different toolkit. Someone who reads the AI tooling space obsessively, ships with it personally, and has strong views - earned from doing the work, not from LinkedIn posts - on what works and what's noise.
You're naturally curious and probably found yourself writing more code than ever before because you heavily use Claude Code. You use it throughout your own workflow in ways your peers don’t.
You're a doer. You like the idea of owning the technical reset of an established market leader more than you like the idea of building something from scratch.
What this isn't
This isn't an "AI CTO" hype role. No one wants a keynote speaker. The founders are commercially sharp and will see through surface-level fluency on the topic inside one meeting. You'll need real, current expertise in how engineering teams are actually using new tools to deliver - the specifics, the tradeoffs, the failure modes. If your AI experience is mostly slide decks and strategy memos, this isn't the role.
It's also not a greenfield build. The stack exists, the team exists, the customers exist. The mandate is to make all three dramatically more effective.
Next step
If you're interested and the above sounds like you please apply.