Strategic Technical Leader / CTO - £140,000 + £10,000 car + up to 25% bonus
Senior Software Engineering and AI Leadership
Location
UK Hybrid
We are looking for a Strategic Technical Leader / CTO to provide technical authority and direction across our client’s software engineering organisation.
You will act as the senior technical authority who guides, mentors, and challenges the client’s Software Development Managers and Team Leads on modern engineering practices, architectural decisions, AI implementation, and technical standards.
Their day to day people management, delivery cadence, and domain expertise are already in place. What they need is someone who has personally built modern software systems and AI capabilities and can teach others to do the same.
The Environment
* Software Development Managers and Team Leads handle day to day people management
* Product ownership sits with a dedicated Technical Solutions Director
* This role exists to raise the technical bar across engineering, AI, and product development
If your strength is strategic technical leadership grounded in real delivery experience, you will thrive here.
What You Will Do
* Provide hands on technical leadership to Development Managers on modern engineering practices
* Define and enforce engineering standards covering architecture, testing, CI CD, security, and quality
* Guide teams on microservices, event driven systems, containerisation, and cloud native design
* Act as technical owner for AI capability, including use case feasibility, architecture, and implementation standards
* Challenge architectural decisions and ensure modern, scalable, secure approaches are adopted
* Mentor senior engineers and managers using experience, not theory
* Partner closely with product, domain specialists, and leadership to align technology with business outcomes
What They Are Looking For
This role requires deep hands on experience. We are explicitly looking for people who have built these systems themselves.
Essential Technical Experience
* Personally implemented CI CD pipelines and DevOps practices with modern tooling
* Designed and delivered microservices based architectures and cloud native systems
* Production experience with containerisation using Docker and Kubernetes
* Strong understanding of automated testing strategies and quality engineering
* Experience defining engineering standards and mentoring teams to adopt them
* Strong knowledge of modern API design and distributed systems
* Recent hands on experience within the last five years
Essential AI and Data Experience
* Built AI or machine learning systems used in production
* Experience with model training, deployment, and monitoring or strong MLOps understanding
* Hands on use of modern AI tooling and frameworks
* Able to guide AI engineers based on real implementation experience, not just strategy
* Experience evaluating AI platforms and making informed technical trade offs
Leadership Experience
* Senior engineering leadership experience in product based organisations
* Proven ability to guide and challenge Development Managers technically
* Comfortable operating as a technical authority without owning day to day people management
* Strong communication skills with technical and non technical stakeholders
Qualifications
* A degree in Computer Science or Engineering is preferred
* Equivalent experience with clear technical depth is acceptable
Why Join
* You will operate at the highest technical level without people management distractions
* You will influence how modern engineering and AI practices are built and scaled
* You will work with leaders who value technical excellence over noise
* You will be trusted to set standards and raise the bar
If you are a senior technical leader / CTO who has built modern software and AI systems and enjoys teaching others through credibility, we would like to hear from you.