Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Founding Technology Lead | Product Engineering & Technology

Location: Chennai / Hybrid

Engagement: Full-Time / Founding Leadership Role

Experience: 5+ years preferred

Function: Technology, Product Engineering & Infrastructure

About the Role

We are looking for a hands-on Chief Technology Officer (CTO) who can independently take ownership of technology — from architecture and product development to deployment, security, scalability, and ongoing engineering.

This is not a traditional people-management CTO role.

The ideal candidate should be capable of taking a product from idea → architecture → development → production deployment → monitoring → continuous improvement, while establishing the technical foundation required to scale the platform.

You will work closely with the founding team to translate business and product requirements into robust, secure and scalable technology solutions.

Key Responsibilities

1. Product & Application Engineering

- Independently design and develop production-grade web applications.
- Translate product requirements and business workflows into technical solutions.
- Build responsive, reliable and maintainable frontend and backend systems.
- Develop APIs, authentication, authorization, dashboards, integrations and database systems.
- Write clean, modular, maintainable and well-documented code.
- Own features end-to-end rather than working only on isolated development tasks.

2. Technology Architecture

- Design scalable application and system architecture.
- Select appropriate frameworks, programming languages, databases, cloud services and third-party technologies.
- Establish development standards, coding practices and engineering principles.
- Design systems with scalability, reliability, security and maintainability in mind.
- Evaluate build-vs-buy decisions and technology trade-offs.

3. Deployment & DevOps

- Independently manage application deployment to production.
- Set up and maintain cloud infrastructure, servers, databases, storage and networking.
- Establish CI/CD pipelines and automated deployment processes.
- Configure development, staging and production environments.
- Implement application monitoring, logging, backups and recovery mechanisms.
- Troubleshoot production issues and ensure application uptime.

4. Security

- Build applications following secure development practices.
- Implement authentication, authorization, access control and data protection.
- Identify and address application and infrastructure vulnerabilities.
- Work with cybersecurity professionals where required for penetration testing, vulnerability assessment and compliance.




- Establish security practices for code, infrastructure, APIs and databases.

5. Performance & Scalability

- Optimize application performance, database queries, APIs and infrastructure.
- Identify bottlenecks before they become production issues.
- Design systems capable of supporting increasing users, transactions and data.
- Implement caching, queues, asynchronous processing and other scalability mechanisms where appropriate.

6. Technical Ownership

- Take complete ownership of the technology stack.
- Diagnose and resolve technical problems independently.
- Review and improve existing architecture and code.
- Maintain technical documentation and system architecture documentation.
- Establish development, testing, release and maintenance processes.
- Ensure technical decisions remain aligned with product and business objectives.

7. Future Engineering Team As the company grows, the CTO will be responsible for:

- Building and mentoring the engineering team.
- Defining technical hiring requirements.
- Establishing engineering workflows and development standards.
- Conducting code and architecture reviews.
- Creating a high-quality engineering culture.
- Delegating effectively without losing technical ownership.

What We Are Looking For We are looking for someone who is strong technically, highly independent and comfortable building from scratch.

Essential

- Strong experience in full-stack web application development.
- Proven ability to independently build and deploy production applications.
- Strong understanding of frontend, backend, APIs and databases.
- Experience with modern web frameworks and programming languages.
- Strong knowledge of SQL and/or NoSQL databases.
- Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or GCP.
- Practical understanding of Linux, networking, deployment and server management.
- Experience with Git, CI/CD and production deployment workflows.
- Understanding of application security and secure coding practices.
- Solid debugging and problem-solving ability.
- Ability to work independently with minimal technical supervision.

Strongly Preferred

- Experience building SaaS platforms, marketplaces or multi-user platforms.
- Experience designing scalable architectures.
- Experience with Docker and containerized deployments.
- Experience with Redis,



queues, background workers or similar infrastructure.
- Experience with cloud-native services.
- Experience implementing monitoring, logging and observability.
- Experience integrating payment gateways, third-party APIs and external services.
- Experience with AI/ML or emerging technologies is an advantage.
- Experience working in an early-stage startup or product company.

The Ideal Candidate You should be someone who can receive a requirement such as:

"We need to build this platform."

…and independently work through:

Requirement → Architecture → Database → UI/UX implementation → Backend → APIs → Authentication → Testing → Security → Deployment → Monitoring → Production → Scaling

You should be comfortable opening the codebase, making architectural decisions, writing the code, deploying the application and solving production issues yourself.

We are looking for a builder and technology owner, not someone who only coordinates external developers.

Technology Ownership The CTO will have ownership across:

Product Engineering

Frontend • Backend • APIs • Database • Integrations

Infrastructure

Cloud • Servers • Networking • Storage • CI/CD

Engineering Quality

Code Quality • Testing • Documentation • Architecture

Security

Application Security • Infrastructure Security • Access Control • Vulnerability Management

Operations

Deployment • Monitoring • Backups • Incident Response • Performance

Success in This Role

Success will mean that the company has:

- A stable and production-ready technology platform.
- A scalable and maintainable architecture.
- Reliable deployment and release processes.
- Strong application and infrastructure security.
- Clear technical documentation.
- Fast resolution of production issues.
- A technology roadmap aligned with business growth.
- A strong engineering foundation that can scale with the company.

Why Join This is an opportunity to take true ownership of technology at an early-stage company.

You will have the opportunity to:

- Shape the entire technology architecture.
- Build products from the ground up.
- Work directly with the founding team.
- Make meaningful technology decisions.
- Build and lead the engineering function.
- Experiment with emerging technologies.
- Eventually build and manage a high-performing technology team.

Role Philosophy Build it. Own it. Deploy it. Scale it.

We are looking for a CTO who doesn't just tell the team how to build the product — but can build the product themselves when required.

also email to [email protected]

📌 Chief Developer (Web App) CTO (Chennai)
🏢 TheDeepTechVerse
📍 Chennai