Chief Technology Officer

Job description

### **About Monument** Monument is the operating system for self-storage companies — the platform operators run their entire business on. Payments, GAAP-compliant accounting, physical access control, customer operations, delinquency, inventory, REIT-level revenue management, and portfolio-wide oversight all run through one system. For the self-storage operators who depend on us, Monument is the business: if it goes down, they can't take a payment or open a gate. We're the open-ecosystem alternative to the legacy incumbents that have run this $50B industry for decades, built from the ground up for multi-facility operators scaling from 3 to 100+ locations. We're Series A (~60 people) which means the platform an entire industry will rely on is still being shaped, and you'd be the one shaping it. ### **About the Role** The CTO will own the entire engineering function — people, delivery, operations, and quality — for a ~30-engineer team based in Brazil, and report directly to the CEO with a seat on our executive leadership team. That makes this a high-stakes seat — the reliability, security, and pace of what your team ships is what lets operators run their facilities day in and day out. To put the decision rights plainly: you own organizational, delivery, staffing, operational, budgetary, external-representation, execution, and architectural decisions. ### **What You'll Own** - **Technical architecture & system design.** Own Monument's system and data architecture — the multi-tenant data model, service boundaries, and platform design that let operators scale from a handful of locations to 100+. Make the build-vs-buy, framework, and platform calls within our Node.js/TypeScript (NestJS), React, and AWS Aurora stack, and carry the technical-debt and hard-to-reverse trade-off decisions that shape our next 2–3 years. - **Delivery.** Ship the roadmap on time, on budget, and at high quality. You're accountable for execution across the org — sprint planning and backlog grooming with Product, release management, version control discipline, and holding Tech Leads, DevOps, and QA to plan. - **People & organization.** Build and maintain a high-performance, high-accountability culture. You are the people manager for Tech Leads, DevOps, and the QA team — owning team structure, the end-to-end hiring process and standards, onboarding, career development, performance management, leveling, and quarterly goals. - **The AI-native SDLC transformation.** Lead Monument's move to an AI-augmented software development lifecycle: select the internal AI tooling, define how we use it, and drive adoption so the team ships materially faster without sacrificing quality. This is a top company priority and a defining mandate of the role. - **Reliability & operations.** Keep the platform dependable as we scale. Own incident management and on-call rotation, release operations, systems-level disaster-recovery oversight, capacity and scalability planning, and third-party vendor management (AWS, Twilio, Domo, and others). DevOps owns CI/CD and environments and reports to you. - **Security.** Be accountable for Monument's overall security. Own the full threat-mitigation strategy and its execution — both active (monitoring, detection, and incident response to live and emerging threats) and passive (secure-by-design protections like access controls, encryption, hardening, and least-privilege built into every application, database, interface, and API from the start, not bolted on as we scale). The Principal Architect contributes the architecture-layer security patterns; you own that the strategy is set, enforced, and working across the stack. - **Quality.** Own the quality bar for what ships. QA is led by a QA team lead who runs day-to-day testing, regression coverage, and team coordination, and he reports to you — but without a senior QA manager above them, you own QA strategy and test-coverage standards directly. Your job is to set those standards, hold the line on quality under delivery pressure, and own the root-cause-analysis process and its communication, partnering with the Principal Architect on the deep technical diagnosis. - **Customer-facing engineering.** Own new-client data migrations end-to-end (tooling, rollback planning, customer communication through cutover) and the integrations program in operation — partner management, monitoring, and incident response — building on the integrations framework the Architect designs. - **Engineering as a business function.** Own the engineering budget, software licenses and vendor contracts, API lifecycle operations (versioning, deprecation, external documentation, infra cost), and developer-productivity tooling — and represent Engineering to Product, Finance, and the Board. ### **What We're Looking For** **Must-haves** - 5+ years as a hands-on individual-contributor engineer, followed by 3–5+ years as an Engineering Manager or equivalent managing 15+ engineers — with sustained tenure in each role rather than a pattern of short stints. - You've owned end-to-end delivery and people for an engineering org at a B2B SaaS company with a large external user base including holding Tech Leads accountable to the roadmap and technical plan. - Deep, hands-on ownership of production infrastructure and operations at scale — 5+ years building or leading a complex SaaS application with a large external user base, with direct accountability for reliability, scalability, incident management and on-call, capacity planning, and operational excellence on a live production SaaS. You've held the pager, not just the org chart. - You are a genuinely strong technical engineer — sufficiently fluent in cloud-infrastructure fundamentals, modern technical architecture, data modeling, scaling, security, and optimization to make system, data, and security architecture decisions yourself (our stack: Node.js/TypeScript/NestJS, React, MySQL/Aurora). You can point to specific high-impact technical decisions you've made and defend the trade-offs behind them. You have led SDLC and you’re an innovative, hands-on adopter of AI coding tools who’s excited to drive an AI-native development transformation and continuously push boundaries. - Proven people leadership: hiring, leveling, performance management, and building accountability — including directly managing Tech Leads or Engineering Managers, and comfort working directly with both DevOps and a QA Lead. - Comfortable being the face of engineering: representing technology to Monument's board, investors, and customers with the same fluency you bring to your own team. - Has directly managed a QA function — or can point to specific examples of driving quality initiatives. Can articulate a long-term QA strategy for a fast-growing SaaS platform at Monument's scale, or can point to specific examples of driving quality initiatives in past experience. - If you are based in Brazil, professionally fluent in English, able to travel to the US as needed, and partnering daily with a US (Dallas) leadership team across time zones. **Nice-to-haves** - Vertical SaaS or operations-heavy, multi-tenant/portfolio software experience (payments or fintech a plus, given our payments and GAAP-accounting surface). - Experience running large data migrations and integration ecosystems. - Built or scaled QA and DevOps functions. - Experience leading a distributed Brazil↔US engineering team. ### **Tech Environment** - **Stack:** Node.js + TypeScript (NestJS) backend, React frontend, AWS Aurora (MySQL), all on AWS. - **Team:** ~30 engineers, primarily in Brazil, spanning Tech Leads, DevOps, and a QA function led by a capable QA Manager. The org is well-staffed, productive, and operating well — you're inheriting a working machine, not a rebuild. - **Architecture:** A dedicated Principal Architect reports to you and owns system/data/security and client-facing AI architecture. - **Stage of infra:** Production SaaS at Series A scale, currently supporting operators with portfolios from a few facilities to 100+ locations. ###