Company Overview

Sweet James is looking for an experienced Chief Technology Officer to join our team. We are a growing, high performance, Personal Injury law firm based in Orange County. If you are a dedicated and ethical professional who thrives in a collaborative environment, we would love to hear from you.

This is a full-time, on-site position at our Newport Beach office location. Ideal candidates must have strong communication skills. We are looking for a well-rounded self-starter who is looking for a home to grow within a high-stakes environment with other high achievers.

CTO Responsibilities

Strategic Leadership and Vision

· Define and execute the technical strategy and roadmap in alignment with the company’s vision and goals.

· Provide strategic direction on the company’s technological platforms and infrastructure.

Team Leadership and Development

· Build, lead, and mentor a high-performing team across the US, remote and international staff.

· Foster a collaborative and inclusive culture within the technology team, promoting innovation and continuous learning.

· Implement best practices for hiring, onboarding, training, and performance management in conjunction with HR team.

Collaboration with Offshore Teams

· Ensure effective collaboration and communication with the development teams.

· Schedule work hours to maximize overlap with the team, ensuring seamless coordination.

· Implement and manage processes to effectively oversee and integrate offshore development efforts.

· Understanding of the tech ecosystem, talent acquisition strategies, and local work culture.

Technical Oversight and Hands-On Contribution

· Provide architectural oversight and ensure the scalability, security, and efficiency of the platform.

· Stay hands-on with key technologies as needed.

· Ensure the development and maintenance of microservices architecture, multi-tenant software, and asynchronous task management.

Process and Operational Efficiency

· Establish and optimize development processes, ensuring efficiency and productivity.

· Implement best practices in application security, continuous integration, and continuous deployment.

· Drive process improvements and automation across the development lifecycle.

· Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of the technology initiatives.

· Regularly monitor and report on the performance of the technology team and the platform.

Scalability and Performance

· Ensure the platform is scalable to support up to 3x the current volume.

· Oversee performance tuning and optimization to handle compute-intensive tasks like OCR and document extraction.

Innovation and Emerging Technologies

· Drive the innovation agenda by fostering a culture of experimentation and research.

· Drive the implementation of Generative AI tools and other emerging technologies in the development process.

· Stay abreast of industry trends and advancements, incorporating relevant technologies to keep the company at the forefront of innovation.

Stakeholder Management

· Collaborate with internal stakeholders, including product, sales, and marketing teams, to align technical initiatives with business goals.

· Manage relationships with external stakeholders, including partners, vendors, and customers.

· Coordinate with the board on providing updates at a regular cadence

· Work with external investors on technical due diligence during the funding process

Quality Assurance

· Lead the quality assurance process to ensure high standards of product quality.

· Implement and manage both manual and automated testing frameworks.

· Ensure continuous integration and continuous testing practices are in place to catch issues early in the development cycle.

· Foster a culture of quality within the development team, emphasizing the importance of thorough testing and quality control.

· Ensure the development of high-quality, reliable, and maintainable code.

Product Development and Delivery

· Oversee the development and delivery of the products, ensuring timely and efficient releases.

· Work closely with product management to define product requirements and prioritize features and enhancements.

Resource Management

· Manage the technology budget, ensuring effective allocation of resources.

· Evaluate and implement tools and technologies that enhance the development process and productivity.

Documentation and Knowledge Sharing

· Promote a culture of documentation and knowledge sharing within the technology team.

· Ensure comprehensive documentation of architectures, processes, and codebases.

Customer-centric Approach

· Ensure that the technology solutions developed are aligned with customer needs and deliver a superior user experience.

· Collect and analyze customer feedback to drive continuous improvement in the product.

DevOps and Infrastructure Management

· Lead the DevOps team to ensure robust and scalable infrastructure.

· Maintain and enhance infrastructure security and scalability.

· Optimize cloud infrastructure spend, ensuring cost-effective use of resources.

· Implement and manage infrastructure as code (IaC) to automate and streamline infrastructure management.

· Monitor and manage infrastructure performance, implementing improvements as needed.

MLOps

· Implement and oversee MLOps practices to streamline the deployment, monitoring, and management of machine learning models.

· Ensure seamless integration of ML models into the production environment.

· Collaborate with data science teams to ensure that ML models are scalable, reliable, and secure.

· Optimize ML pipelines for performance, cost, and accuracy.

Required Skills

· 12 to 15 years of experience in technology leadership roles, with a significant portion in tech operations and AI companies.

· Proven track record of working with startups and scaling them successfully.

· Experience in both early-stage and growth-stage startup journeys.

· Demonstrated success in scaling tech operations teams

· Proven track record of building and nurturing a strong tech compliance culture.

· Specific experience in establishing and managing technical teams.

· Extensive experience in building and leading high-performing engineering teams.

· Strong background in working with offshore teams and managing distributed development efforts.

· Exposure to Salesforce CRM, multi-tenant software, microservices architecture, asynchronous task management, rules engines, and workflow engines.

· Demonstrated ability to ensure platform scalability, security, and process efficiency.

· Experience in handling sensitive data such as PII.

· Experience as a Chief Security Officer (CSO) or Director of IT in leading platform security and ensuring compliance with security standards.

· Proven experience as a major contributor to the technology team through major transaction events, managing technical due diligence smoothly.

· Experience with implementing Generative AI tools in the development process.

· Expertise in handling compute-intensive tasks such as OCR and document extraction.

· Exposure to document management systems and familiarity with related technologies.

· Experience in leading DevOps teams, managing infrastructure security, scalability, and optimizing cloud infrastructure spend.

· Experience in implementing and managing tech practices.

· Experience in quality assurance, including both manual and automated testing frameworks.

· Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.

· Experience of working with the Board in updating technical progress and challenges effectively to non-technical stakeholder

Sweet James LLP

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