CTO (Chief Technology Officer)

Location: London, UK or Kraków, Poland

About the opportunity: A ‘Chief Technology Officer’ role with broad scope and positive impact.

Smart is one of the world’s leading technology providers in its market (a $62 trillion AUM global market) looking for a Chief Technology Officer to help us push forward on the next step of our journey. We are backed by many of the world’s leading investors, have grown over the last 10 years to work with government and financial services clients across the world, and are in the position of having an excellent technology and client base, as well as great opportunity ahead. We are now taking the next big leap forward, which creates an exceptional opportunity for a Chief Technology Officer who is looking to make a real difference through engineering excellence, people-focused leadership, and enjoys creating change both within a business and the wider world.

About Smart: a truly tech-focused business, transforming its sector

In the UK, we power the technology behind ‘Smart Pension’, a workplace pension supporting almost 1.5 million UK savers; in Ireland, our platform powers one of the largest pension providers in the country; in the Middle East, our technology is responsible for powering financial savings excellence in one of the fastest moving markets in the world; and more beyond. Retirement savings is a $62 trillion AUM global market, and underpins the financial wellbeing of populations across the globe. We approach this with our mission: to transform retirement, savings and financial well-being, across all generations, around the world.

About you - our next Chief Technology Officer

We are looking for someone with a modern and deeply technical engineering background that includes private equity backed companies in the finance sector, transformation of engineering practices to be more commercially and bottom-line focused, and, ideally, large data intensive platforms.

As Chief Technology Officer at Smart, we require someone who brings with them a people-first approach to leadership, by working closely with their senior Engineering Managers to deliver Engineering to the highest level. We have a strong focus on culture within the engineering team, which has helped produce a clean code base and underpins our CI/CD pipeline and agile train.

Our Platform

Our platform, Keystone, has captured billions of assets, and supports millions of savers. It provides opportunities to grow the Platform as a Service pipeline globally. Underpinning the Keystone platform is an engineering team that needs you to be a problem solver, have a collaborative approach and have a relentless focus on achieving business outcomes.

Our culture is very important to us, so we are looking for a leader who understands the meaning of “thank you” and who leads and influences a team, not manages it.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead the change of the technology team ensuring highly efficient and value-driven output by adopting agile thinking and processes. 
• Oversee the overall engineering team, including developers, QA, infrastructure and the service desk, across all territories, ensuring effective collaboration and alignment.
• Collaborate with Solutions and Product Directors to streamline the process from product conception to delivery.
• Review and assess current engineering practices and implement continuous improvement programs to drive faster and leaner development cycles.
• Continuously enhance and develop automated test coverage and test automation to maintain and improve the platform’s codebase, aiming to exceed the current 96% test coverage.
• Balance architectural desire against project delivery - tradeoffs between performance, delivery, reliability & scalability whilst you map against business objectives and deadlines.
• Be a technologist with knowledge of front-end languages such as JavaScript and React frameworks or backend languages such as Ruby on Rails. Help our team grow and develop.
• Act as the representative of the engineering team to the wider business, keeping them informed and engaged in the development processes and progress updates.
• As you will be working closely with the team you will also manage appraisals, salary reviews and day to day workloads.
• Be in charge of the technology and people budget within engineering and work with the procurement function to regularly review and optimise our external spend.
• Lead and develop the Engineering organisation which includes our nearshore teams as well as our direct teams.
• Proactively identify and solve any barriers, risks and issues preventing success.
• Ensure effective budget planning, resource forecasting, internal reporting and engagement in all relevant governance forums and processes.
• Regular travel will be required, especially to Poland where the majority of engineers will be based.

Requirements

• Demonstrable experience as a Director, Head of Engineering or a CTO.
• Proven background in a fast scaling technology business and financial services in your recent career history.  Background in wealth management or insurance platforms at a FinTech or InsureTech would be an advantage but is not mandatory.
• Strong leadership skills – this is a leadership role that is all about leading teams and getting the best from our incredible Engineers.
• Strong understanding of software development methodologies, architectural patterns, and best practices.
• Effective team player and collaborator able to work seamlessly across departments.
• Strong experience and governance across back-end & front-end development. Ability to discern right from wrong in the context of an engineering decision.
• Able to lead complex projects – manage multiple stakeholders and deliver to targets.
• Strong communicator – This role requires someone to be very comfortable communicating across the business and at all levels.
• Experience with API based application development is essential.
• Proven experience in software architecture and leading large-scale transformation projects.
• Personable and appreciative, leading teams with a people-first approach
• Familiarity with modern DevOps tools and practices, including CI/CD pipelines, containerization, and infrastructure as code

Benefits

At Smart, one of the eight principles we work to is “We want happy and good people in our team”. We created a list of benefits that helps us achieve this goal:

• 25 days’ holiday per year, increasing with length of service.
• £500 annual training budget to spend on your professional development
• Extensive private healthcare, including dental, eyecare and EAP
• Enhanced sick leave (three months’ pay per year)
• Enhanced maternity and paternity (maternity – 6 months fully paid/paternity – 3 weeks fully paid)
• Death in service insurance cover
• Fully-paid five-week sabbatical after five years of employment
• In office wellbeing, such as manicures, massages and barbers. 
• Smart employees also enjoy a 50% discount on orders from our sister company Arena Flowers, Britain's most ethical florist. They offer unique hand-tied bouquets, luxury flowers, letterbox flowers, plants and gifts to spend on friends and loved ones or even for yourself.

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We think Smart is an awesome place to work. If it sounds like somewhere you’d like to work, too, and if you’re ready to play your part in our continued success in the future, then naturally we’d love to meet you.