23 Oct
Catch
Sandton
Our client is developing a Software as a Service (SAAS) AI platform for enhancing actuarial work. Their mission is to revolutionize the insurance industry by making advanced models accessible and user-friendly for actuaries across life, non-life and health insurance.
Position Summary
They are seeking a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to join their leadership team, who is a hands-on leader who can both strategize and dive into code when needed. The ideal candidate will drive their technological strategy, lead the engineering team, and play a crucial role in shaping the product development. This is an opportunity to be at the forefront of applying machine learning to the insurance industry.
The ideal candidate will:
- Have a deep understanding of concurrency patterns and best practices for building responsive, scalable systems
- Be a strong problem-solver with the ability to navigate complex technical and business challenges
- Be an excellent communicator who can bridge the gap between technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Be highly adaptable and comfortable with the fast-paced, ever-changing environment of a startup
- Be an ethical leader with a strong commitment to data privacy and security
Key Responsibilities
The CTO will be responsible for designing systems that can handle concurrent model training, real-time data ingestion, and responsive user interfaces, leveraging asynchronous processing and efficient message passing to ensure optimal performance and user experience.
1. Technical Leadership
- Develop and execute the company's technology strategy aligned with business goals
- Make key technology decisions, including choice of stack, architecture and third-party services
- Stay abreast of emerging technologies and industry trends,
particularly in ML, AI and insurtech
- Ensure the scalability, security, and reliability of our SAAS platform
Product Development
- Collaborate with the product team to translate business requirements into technical specifications
- Work closely with the product leads to build a platform to design, fit and host ML/AI models
- Ensure the user-friendliness and efficiency of our data upload, preprocessing and model training workflows
- Establish MLOps practices for efficient model development, deployment and monitoring of models built using the AI platform
- Ensure compliance with data protection regulations and implement robust data governance practices
- Architect and implement robust asynchronous processing systems and message passing workflows to ensure efficient handling of computationally intensive ML tasks and real-time data processing
Team Leadership
- Build and lead a high-performing engineering team
- Establish best practices for software development, including coding standards, code reviews and testing
- Foster a culture of innovation, continuous learning and technical excellence
Infrastructure and Security
- Design and oversee the implementation of our cloud infrastructure (preferably using AWS)
- Implement robust security measures to protect sensitive insurance data
- Ensure high availability and disaster recovery capabilities for our SAAS platform
Financial Management
- Manage the technology budget effectively
- Make strategic decisions on build vs. buy for various components of our stack
- Evaluate and select vendor solutions when appropriate
Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related field; Master's degree preferred
- 5-10 years of experience in software development, with at least 3 years in a technical leadership role
- Experience in building and scaling SAAS platforms at an enterprise level
- Deep understanding of cloud technologies, preferably AWS or GCP
- Experience with backend development (preferably Python) and modern front-end web development frameworks (preferably React)
- Extensive experience designing and implementing asynchronous systems and message passing architectures, particularly in the context of distributed computing and ML workflows
- Proficiency with message brokers, queuing systems and stream processing frameworks
- Demonstrated ability to design and optimize high-throughput, low-latency data pipelines for real-time processing
- Familiarity with event-driven architectures and their application in ML systems
- Experience with MLOps and automated ML pipelines
- Knowledge of data protection regulations and security best practices
- Strong leadership and team management skills
- Excellent communication skills
▶️ Chief Technology Officer - Sandton
🖊️ Catch
📍 Sandton