Chief Technology Officer - Travelstride

Travelstride is an ambitious Venture-funded Seed stage company led by industry & startup veterans that is serving a large, long-term growing opportunity. Our investors include JetBlue Technology Ventures, NFX (top VC for marketplaces), New York Angels, Sand Hill Angels, and the founders of Trulia, Get There, Hipmunk, TripIt, and Google Now.

We are the top US marketplace for tours, private tailor-made vacations, & adventure trips. Our platform hosts more than 60,000 travel experiences across every continent from ~1,500 of the world’s best travel companies and local experts. With over 125,000 trusted reviews, Travelstride enables travelers of all types to explore the world with ease and confidence. And we are expanding into becoming the most useful and engaged online community for the top 10% of passionate travelers.

We are a values and mission driven company. While many say it, we live it daily, and encourage you to review our core values on our site at travelstride.com/careers to see if we are a good mutual fit.

Overview: We are seeking a visionary CTO to lead our engineering team and drive the evolution of our technology stack. This role is critical in aligning our technical solutions with the company’s strategic goals and ensuring our platform is innovative, robust, scalable, and efficient.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead the engineering team in designing and implementing scalable architecture solutions.

• Assess and enhance the current tech stack, recommending and integrating modern technologies where necessary.

• Draft and enforce engineering processes that align with product demands and improve development efficiency.

• Draft and enforce functional processes that align with company goals and long term strategy. 

• Collaborate with product management to ensure alignment between technical solutions and business objectives.

• Mentor and guide engineers, fostering a culture of innovation and continuous improvement.

• Oversee system architecture, ensuring best practices in security, performance, and reliability.

• Stay ahead of industry trends, continuously evaluating new tools and technologies to enhance our platform.

Requirements:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

• Proven experience as a Chief Architect or in a senior architectural role, ideally within the travel or e-commerce sectors.

• Strong leadership skills with experience managing and mentoring engineering teams.

• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.

• A track record of successfully aligning technical strategies with business goals.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with leading functional and technical teams. 

• Familiarity with agile methodologies and software development principles.

About You:

• You love technology, software, and experimenting with new approaches and tools

• You’ve been playing with AI for years and crafted experiments for fun as well as work

• You wake up excited to write code and dive into solving the most challenging problems

• You obsess over high quality code, and think about process and scale, not just the immediate problem

• You want to lead and create a technology platform that utilizes payments, marketplace messaging, and cutting edge Generative AI

• You enjoy thinking about high level business and user goals and collaborating with your colleagues to generate scrappy yet scalable solutions

• Your perfect work day is writing code 80% of the time, meeting with fellow engineers 10%, and collaborating with business leaders on strategy 10%

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.