Job Description

Job Purpose

Building world-class products like Cardano, Midnight and RealFi requires not just brilliant engineers, but a living ecosystem where standards, habits and ways of working compound over time. The CTO is the person who builds that ecosystem.

Working at the intersection of strategy and code, the CTO partners with the CEO to define the engineering direction, align the CPO and COO to keep the roadmap sound and moving at pace, and work with IO Labs to bring the most promising ideas from research into reality. They shape how IOG builds in an AI-first world, embedding an agentic programming philosophy that makes AI a genuine force multiplier across every team. And they grow the people who make all of this possible, through a Centre of Excellence that sets the technical standard for every product and venture IOG builds next.

CTO Accountabilities

• Work with the CEO to define the future engineering strategy for IOG.
• Own enterprise technology and architectural direction.
• Shape the developer ecosystem: the standards, culture, tooling, and working practices that determine how IOG builds software.
• AI-first engineering: developing and embedding an agentic programming philosophy across IOG - establishing how engineers and AI agents work together to build and ship at pace in an agent-driven world.
• Working closely with the COO and CPO to ensure the roadmap is technically sound, resourced appropriately, and delivered at velocity.
• Venture viability: partnering with IO Labs and ventures to assess whether new ideas are technically feasible, advising on build approach, and ensuring promising concepts can move quickly from research to reality.
• Respect the autonomy of advanced ventures, while ensuring they remain aligned with the wider ecosystem.
• Technical direction and architecture: the technology thesis, the standards all teams follow, and the decisions that keep IOG’s platforms coherent, scalable, and secure.
• The engineering bench: attracting and developing world-class engineers through a Centre of Excellence model - setting the technical standard and ensuring it propagates across product and venture teams.
• Holds enterprise-level budget responsibility within the technology function, including infrastructure, tooling, AI compute, and strategic technology investments.
• Collaborates with the CEO and COO on cross-functional and enterprise-wide financial decisions where technology investment intersects with broader business priorities.
• Operates with executive-level autonomy to set policies, allocate technical resources, and shape strategic initiatives within the technology domain.

Internal Partnerships, working with

• The CEO: a thought partner in shaping company-wide technology strategy and representing engineering at the highest level.

• The Engineers: personally recruiting, mentoring, and serving as the technical authority the team trusts and aspires to.
• The CPO: aligning roadmap ambition with engineering capability, assessing the technical feasibility of product requirements, and providing realistic delivery timelines. The CPO owns what is built; the CTO owns how it is built.
• The COO: defining the boundary between technical standards and operational delivery. The CTO retains the engineering hiring bar and provides regular technical health metrics including technical debt levels, architectural risks, and engineering velocity blockers; the COO owns execution at scale.
• IO Labs: translating research and strategic bets into working prototypes and products, providing an honest technical view on what is viable and how quickly IOG can move.
• The CTO participates in Investment Committee, Venture Acceleration Boards, and acquisition discussions as the most senior technical voice, and provides venture-ready technical foundations to new ideas and proto-ideas.

External Partners

• Serve as the primary external technical voice for IOG, including conferences, panels, investor forums, and key partnerships.
• Maintain strong relationships with leading researchers, founders, and technical talent across the Web3 and wider technology ecosystem.
• Translate IOG’s technical strategy into language that boards, investors, and non-technical executives can engage with.

Executive Leadership

• Leads the technology function at enterprise level.
• Owns the leadership bench for the technology domain, ensuring structure, capability, and succession.
• Collaborates with C-suite peers to align leadership expectations across the company.
• Champions diversity, culture, and leadership excellence within the technology function.
• Shapes policies and initiatives across the organization where technology intersects, driving a performance culture by modeling high standards and collaborating with C-suite peers to ensure consistent expectations at scale.

Requirements

Specialist Skills

• A clearly articulated engineering philosophy and proven ability to apply it - setting and upholding engineering, architectural, and security standards across a large, distributed organisation.
• Deep expertise in Web3 technologies.
• Strong systems thinking, with the ability to see a developer ecosystem as a whole and predict emergent behaviour.
• Clear point of view on how AI is reshaping software engineering, and how to use it to amplify a healthy ecosystem rather than a chaotic one.
• Hands-on technical credibility: commits code to engineering repositories, reviews engineering work, and works alongside engineers regularly.
• Experience leading technical due diligence for acquisitions, partnerships, and venture investments.
• Strong ability to translate complex technical concepts for board members, investors, and non-technical executives.
• Strong external profile and the ability to represent IOG credibly at the most senior levels of the industry.
• Deep familiarity with formal verification methods and cryptographic correctness, including zero-knowledge proof systems, consensus protocol verification, and provably secure system design.

Education and Experience

• Progressive technology leadership experience, including significant time in senior or executive technical roles.
• Proven track record as a senior technical leader in a high-growth technology, blockchain, or venture studio environment.
• Deep, demonstrable experience in Web3, blockchain, or distributed systems.
• Direct experience shaping a developer ecosystem at scale, including engineering culture, standards, tooling, and platform decisions.
• Experience contributing to executive-level strategy, board materials, and investment decisions.
• Strong external profile within the Web3, blockchain, or wider technology ecosystem is a strong plus.
• A hands-on engineering leader who makes decisions, moves fast, and builds developer ecosystems that ship.
• Deep technical credibility: someone engineers trust, with strong architecture instincts and a bias for getting things done.
• Experience operating at the intersection of research and product in a fast-moving environment.
• Someone who thrives in a high-trust, distributed leadership model and builds strong peer relationships naturally.