Chief Technology Officer

Rockstar is recruiting on behalf of a company that provides growth capital to outstanding brick-and-mortar operators such as coffee shops, gyms, salons, restaurants, clinics, studios, and more. This client helps great local businesses expand without selling equity or taking predatory financing. They are building a financing platform that enables the next generation of great local businesses to grow, scale, and thrive, thereby making communities better places to live.

The client is hiring their first CTO to own product and engineering, set the technical direction, and architect the system that powers every deal across two product lines.

What You’ll Lead: Product + Design + Engineering

- Own the product direction and roadmap end-to-end — grounded in first principles and direct exposure to operators, not just internal asks.

- Evolve and refine what has already been built — strengthen foundations, align architecture to scale, simplify where needed.

- Design and build workflows across underwriting, capital deployment, servicing, repayment tracking, and investor visibility.

- Write code early and often — serve as a player/coach while gradually recruiting and developing a high-trust team.

- Work closely with the existing European engineering team while building an Atlanta-centered technical core.

Embedded Finance & Infrastructure

- Lead integrations with BaaS partners, card issuance programs, KYC/AML, ledgering, payment rails, and capital movement systems.

- Architect an internal system where capital can move quickly, safely, and transparently.

- Oversee the design, training, and iteration of automated underwriting and credit decisioning models (including how data is collected, interpreted, and acted upon).

- Own the launch of the embedded financing capabilities — enabling seamless funding experiences across partner channels.

- Build internal ops tools that allow scaling from dozens to hundreds to thousands of funded locations without proportionally adding headcount.

Who You Are

Strong candidates will have one or more of the following:

- Founding product and engineering leader who built something real from scratch and scaled a team that loved working together.

- A 10x builder at a high-caliber fintech or embedded finance startup with actual money-movement experience.

- Experience in lending workflows, credit models, machine learning, or algorithmic decisioning.

- Ideally, experience working in a VC-backed environment where speed, ambiguity, and ownership are the norm.

And you:

- Are visibly obsessed with building — people can tell within one or two conversations.

- Care deeply about product taste: simplicity, clarity, elegance.

- Can move from big architecture to hands-on implementation to winning small details without ego.

- Are hungry, ambitious, and want to own an outcome — not just ship tickets.

- Have demonstrably accelerated the careers of others who have worked with you.

You Will Not Love It Here If

- You speak in abstractions and architect endlessly instead of shipping.

- You are uncomfortable with direct, warm, high-candor communication.

- You are excessively verbose and don’t understand “air time management” and ensuring that other points of view are being cultivated in conversations.

- If on a 30-minute meeting you’re on full blast for the entire time, this isn’t going to work.

- You default to blame instead of extreme ownership.

- You have only worked in environments with established processes and support structures.

- You believe building a startup means recreating big-company rituals at a smaller scale.

What Success Looks Like (Year 1–2)

- Your work is driving very high revenue growth that is sticky.

- Credit decisioning models are consistently improving and learning, not static spreadsheets.

- Capital flow, servicing, and fund operations are highly automated, composable, observable, and a joy to use.

- The platform becomes the single source of truth for internal execution and external experience.

- Operators and investors describe the product as surprisingly thoughtful, easy, and respectful of their time.

- Engineering grows from “you plus remote team” to “you plus a hand-picked group of A-players you personally attract and mentor.”

- You code in the morning and are in a workshop with partners and customers in the afternoon.

Why This is Worth Your Life’s Best Work

- What you build here fuels real businesses, real neighborhoods, real jobs, and real economic mobility.

- This is not a feature team. It’s an opportunity to architect a new category in private credit and small business growth.

- You’ll join a world-class team with illogically deep talent density and a category of one culture.