Role Summary
The CTO is responsible for technical delivery, engineering leadership, and technology strategy at Epitome. This role provides dedicated technical leadership at the executive level, ensuring engineering excellence and operational consistency across all technical functions.
Reports to: CEO
Direct reports: Tech Team (engineers across AI, backend, frontend, DevOps, QA)
Core Ownership Areas
- End-to-end technical delivery: From requirements through deployment and support
- Architecture: System design, technology choices, and technical standards
- Release readiness: Ensuring all releases meet quality, security, and client requirements before go-live
Key Responsibilities
End-to-End Technical Delivery, Architecture & Release Readiness
- Own end-to-end delivery from requirements intake through production deployment and post-release support
- Make and document architecture decisions, establish technical standards, and ensure systems are scalable, secure, and maintainable
- Define and enforce release criteria including functional completeness, testing coverage, security and compliance checks, performance validation, and rollback plans
- Own production stability, incident response, and post-mortems
Engineering Team Leadership
- Own technical people management: 1:1s, performance, career development, hiring
- Run daily or weekly standups with consistent cadence and accountability
- Remove blockers so the team can execute without escalation to CEO
- Build team culture: collaboration, quality, and ownership
Development Process & Delivery
- Establish and enforce development processes: sprint planning, code review, deployment workflows
- Own technical delivery timelines and ensure milestones are met
- Own quality outcomes for client and product standards
- Set technical prioritisation across client delivery, product development, and technical debt
Enterprise IT & Scaling
- Provide enterprise IT expertise to scale beyond proof-of-concept
- Align with enterprise clients on security and compliance requirements, integration architecture and APIs, infrastructure and deployment standards, change management and release processes
- Bridge proof-of-concept to production by identifying and closing enterprise-readiness gaps
- Ensure documentation meets enterprise client standards
Technology Strategy
- Own technical architecture and technology choices
- Drive build vs. buy decisions across tools, platforms, and vendors
- Maintain a technical roadmap aligned to business needs
- Identify opportunities to leverage emerging technologies (AI, automation)
Working Rhythm
Daily: Run or oversee standup, be available for team questions and unblocking, oversee team adherence to development best practices, support Business Analysts/Sales with tech pre-sales.
Weekly: 1:1 with CEO (30 minutes), 1:1s with each direct report, technical review and planning session with the team.
Monthly: OKR progress review, technical roadmap review, team retrospective.
Decision Authority (no CEO approval needed)
- Release go or no-go decisions
- Technical architecture within approved projects
- Sprint priorities and task assignments
- Code review and merge decisions
- Development tool and process choices
- Bug prioritisation and fixes
- Team scheduling and workload balancing
- Production incident response and resolution
Key Metrics
Delivery: Milestone hit rate ≥ 90%, bug escape rate tracking, regular and predictable deployment frequency.
Team: Zero CEO technical escalations per week, 100% standup adherence, quarterly team satisfaction pulse check.
Enterprise Client: UAT pass rate, post-delivery client technical satisfaction
