Senior Technical Team Lead

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Chief Technology Officer based in Switzerland. This is a hands-on C-level technology leadership role focused on transforming a SaaS engineering organization into a high-velocity, product-focused team. You will own the technology vision, engineering strategy, R&D budget, technical direction, and infrastructure roadmap. The role combines deep technical leadership with business strategy, people development, security, and operational excellence. You’ll lead a small, senior engineering team while remaining close enough to the work to contribute directly when needed. A major focus will be embedding AI-assisted development practices and building sustainable improvements in engineering productivity. You’ll oversee large-scale distributed infrastructure, Kubernetes, DevOps, security, compliance, and cost optimization. Working closely with executives, product leaders, customers, and the board, you’ll help shape how technology drives long-term business and customer value. Accountabilities: - Own the overall technology vision, roadmap, and engineering strategy, ensuring technical priorities remain closely aligned with business objectives and customer value. - Lead the transformation toward a high-velocity, product-focused engineering organization that consistently delivers valuable features and improvements. - Introduce and scale AI-assisted development tools and practices, establishing appropriate quality standards, review processes, and responsible usage across engineering workflows. - Own architecture and infrastructure decisions with a holistic approach to total cost of ownership, balancing hosting costs, maintenance requirements, technical debt, and engineering opportunity costs. - Oversee a multi-region, Kubernetes-based production environment, maintaining high standards for reliability, operational hygiene, performance, and cost efficiency. - Monitor and optimize infrastructure economics, including unit costs and cost per render, while maintaining the reliability and scalability required by a high-volume SaaS platform. - Maintain high standards across software quality, performance, security, scalability, and reliability. - Track emerging technologies and changes in engineering practices, identifying innovations that can meaningfully improve how products are built and delivered. - Represent the technology organization with customers, partners, executives, board members, and other external stakeholders. - Own security and compliance as an ongoing operational program, including maintaining certification readiness, audit processes, ownership structures, and organizational resilience. - Guide and mentor engineers, establish clear expectations, support career development, and foster a culture of ownership, accountability, diversity, and inclusion. - Build an environment where engineers take responsibility for their technical decisions and continuously identify and resolve delivery bottlenecks. - Own the continuous improvement cycle for engineering delivery, using measurable outcomes to identify constraints and improve development speed over time. - Strengthen DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, observability, monitoring, and operational processes. - Define meaningful engineering metrics and use data to improve workflows, delivery performance, infrastructure efficiency, and team effectiveness. - Lead organizational and technical changes thoughtfully, ensuring affected teams and customers receive appropriate communication, context, and opportunities to raise concerns before changes are implemented. - Partner with the CEO and broader leadership team on company strategy and communicate technology progress, priorities, risks, and investments to executive and board-level stakeholders.