Company Description:
Calintro is a pre-revenue venture planned and developed by Decisive Edge. We are currently raising the financing required for its proof-of-concept, pilot, and initial commercialization. We are therefore not recruiting into a conventionally funded scale-up with established departments, large budgets, or fully defined roles.
We are building the team that will help create that company.
For the right people, that means unusually significant influence over the product, operating model, methodology, and culture from an early stage. It also means working in an environment where priorities will evolve as we learn from users, university partners, and the pilot.
The precise employment or contractual structure and compensation arrangements will be discussed with candidates as part of the recruiting process and will reflect the company's stage and financing.
- Candidates selected to proceed to an interview involving confidential details of Calintro's product, methodology, technology, partnerships, or business plans will be required to sign a confidentiality agreement before that discussion.
The Role:
The Mission
Turn Calintro's product concept and methodology into a reliable, scalable and exceptionally useful software product - and create a technical environment in which internal developers, contractors, and potentially distributed development teams can contribute effectively without compromising the coherence of the product.
This is not primarily a corporate CTO role.
We are looking for a senior, hands-on technical leader who is equally comfortable discussing the problem we are trying to solve, making an architectural decision, reviewing a pull request, challenging a feature assumption, and helping determine what should - or should not - be built next.
What You Will Own
You will have primary responsibility for:
- Product and technical architecture
- Engineering standards and technical quality
- Technical implementation of the Calintro platform
- Development environment, source control, testing and release processes
- Backend, frontend, APIs, data architecture and integrations
- Security, authentication, permissions and privacy by design
- Cloud infrastructure and deployment architecture
- Technical evaluation of build-versus-buy decisions
- Technical decomposition of work for internal and external contributors
- Code-review and integration standards
- Technical documentation
- Engineering contribution to product decisions
- Technical readiness for university pilots and subsequent scaling
If Calintro uses a distributed or community-build development model, you will help design the technical structure that makes that possible: modular boundaries, APIs, coding standards, automated testing, contribution rules, documentation and integration processes.
You will work closely with Design & Visual Communication on product experience and with Program Management & Delivery on commitments, sequencing, dependencies and capacity.
What We Are Looking For
We expect the strongest candidates will have substantial experience building production software, likely including many of the following:
- 8+ years of meaningful software-development experience, although demonstrated capability matters more than a specific number
- Strong modern web-application development experience
- Experience across frontend, backend, APIs and databases
- Strong understanding of software architecture and data modelling
- Cloud and DevOps experience
- Authentication, authorization and application-security fundamentals
- Git, CI/CD, automated testing and release-management experience
- Experience taking products from concept or prototype into real-world use
- Experience leading other developers and reviewing their work
- Experience integrating work produced by multiple developers or teams
- Experience working directly with founders, product leaders or non-technical executives
Experience in startups, open-source projects, distributed development environments, developer platforms, or multi-team software environments would be particularly valuable.
A computer-science or software-engineering education is welcome, but it is not a substitute for evidence that you can build and ship good products.
How You Think
We are particularly interested in someone who asks:
What problem are we trying to solve, how will we know if we solved it, and what is the fastest responsible way to learn?
You should be technically rigorous without confusing sophistication with value.
We want someone capable of distinguishing between:
- what must be engineered properly now;
- what can appropriately remain provisional;
- what should be bought instead of built; and
- what should not be built at all.
You should enjoy helping other people become productive rather than regarding every task as something you need to implement personally.
This role requires low ego, intellectual curiosity, strong judgment, transparency about risk, and comfort operating in an environment where requirements will evolve.
