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
