Job Description
We're looking for a Contract CTO to lead the engineering execution of completing a complex distributed system already in production. The platform is partially built, runs on dedicated hardware, and needs senior engineering leadership to drive the founder's existing roadmap to V1 completion and into stable operation. The technical surface is real engineering work: Kotlin/Spring Boot 3.2 orchestration on Java 17, Apache Kafka event streaming, Redisson distributed locking, PostgreSQL transactional state, Neo4j graph queries, Redis caching layer. The worker layer is Node.js running browser and device automation against a physical device fleet. Frontend is React/TypeScript/Vite/Tailwind. Infrastructure is Docker-based with Jenkins CI/CD and Prometheus/Grafana observability. The system is roughly half-built. The remaining work spans reliability hardening, distributed systems debugging, integration completion, and demonstrating unattended production operation under load. Scope and priorities are defined by the founder. Your job is to execute that scope through to completion with senior engineering judgment. This is a senior execution role with engineering team leadership responsibilities. We need someone with the technical depth to inherit a complex codebase, audit what's actually working versus what's claimed-working, lead engineers through implementation, and ship the founder's planned scope reliably. You'd have technical execution authority — how the work gets done, code quality standards, engineering process, technical debugging calls — while the founder retains authority over what gets built, in what order, and what tradeoffs are acceptable. We need someone who has shipped production distributed systems before, who can read 50K+ lines of inherited code and form an honest opinion about it within a week, who understands that completion engineering is harder than greenfield because you're working against someone else's architectural decisions while delivering against a defined scope. Experience leading small engineering teams (1-3 engineers under you) is valuable. We expect you to use AI tooling fluently — Claude Code, Cursor, or equivalent — as part of your daily workflow. If this fits, send a brief note describing the most demanding distributed systems engagement you've delivered to a defined scope, what your engineering execution process looks like when inheriting a partially-built codebase, and what kind of engagement structure works for you. We're looking for senior execution leadership, not architectural ownership.