The sailing community Sila Vetra is opening a CTO position.
Sila Vetra is the largest sailing school in Russia. The company develops its own digital platform that supports business operations: sales, bookings, finances, internal processes, and client services.
Currently, the product’s support and development are handled by an external development team. They are looking for a Technical Director who will own the company's technical strategy, be able to deeply understand the existing system, and gradually take on technical leadership.
Why this position is open:
The product operates in a real production environment with daily users and financial transactions. Today, an external contractor is responsible for its stability.
The company understands that developing the product without its own strong technical leader is risky. They need a person who can objectively assess the current state of the system, define a development strategy, and only then form an internal engineering team.
Important: the company is not looking for a process manager. They are looking for an engineer who is ready to work independently with code, architecture, and infrastructure.
What you will be doing:
In the first months of work, you will:
- Understand the company's business, product structure, and development plans
- Study the existing development process
- Deeply immerse yourself in the current codebase
- Conduct a technical audit of the product
- Identify architectural risks and technical debt
- Formulate a platform development strategy considering business objectives, existing technologies, and constraints
- Determine the necessary engineering team structure and requirements for future employees
- Defend the proposed development plan, budgets, and timelines to management
- Gradually assume technical responsibility for the product
In the future:
- Build an internal development team
- Conduct technical interviews
- Make architectural decisions
- Establish development and operational processes
- Ensure system reliability and stability
Candidate expectations:
- Backend: deep experience in commercial development with PHP, understanding of modern approaches to building backend systems, confident work with unfamiliar codebases
- Frontend: confident understanding of JavaScript, understanding of API operations, asynchronicity, state management, error handling;
- Architecture
You can:
- Quickly understand unfamiliar code
- Analyze existing architecture
- Identify real bottlenecks
- Explain why changes are truly necessary
- Make decisions based on business value, not on trendy technologies
- Objectively assess the level of developers
- Conduct technical interviews
- Be a "player-coach"
- Make technical decisions independently
DevOps and operations. It's not necessary to be a DevOps engineer, but it's important to understand:
- CI/CD
- Deployment processes
- Server infrastructure
- Cloud services
- Monitoring
- Logging
- Alerting
- Product high availability practices
They especially value people who understand the value of legacy code and know how to develop it without the desire to "rewrite everything from scratch".
What definitely won't work:
You likely won't be a good fit if you:
- Stopped writing code a long time ago
- Want to focus only on managing people and processes
- Offer to completely rewrite the product first
- Prefer to build complex architecture for architecture's sake
- Are not willing to dive into someone else's codebase independently
The company offers:
- The opportunity to define the technical future of one of the largest players in its industry
- A high level of autonomy in making technical decisions
- Direct work with company management
- The ability to assemble an engineering team based on your chosen strategy
- An interesting product with real users and high business load
- A decent compensation level, discussed individually
- Discounts on sailing training, regattas, and other Sila Vetra products worldwide
For the company, this position is the first and most important technical hire.
The company doesn't want to hire a team first and then look for a leader. They are first looking for a person who can understand the existing system, determine the direction of development, and only then form a strong engineering organization.
In your cover letter, please write:
- A brief story about yourself: what are your hobbies, why you see yourself in this role
- When you are ready to start and your salary expectations
- It would be great if you could share links to your social media profiles
