CTO - M3 Informatica

The Opportunity You will join the leadership team as a core member, reporting to the CEO. You will own the full technology strategy, engineering organisation, product delivery, and platform architecture. The platform has to be reliable, the data has to be an asset, and the opportunity to create competitive distance through AI is real. The CTO will be the company's senior technology leader, responsible for the product and engineering roadmap, the modernisation of the software platform, and the strategic adoption of AI across both the product and internal operations. Reporting directly to the CEO, this person will also lead a lean client support function and be accountable for driving efficiency improvements by leveraging automation and AI tooling to do more with less, without compromising service quality for public-sector clients. The company’s platform is the payroll and HR system of record for Spanish public health services and local government — mission-critical, deeply embedded, and 35 years in the making — but built on a legacy architecture that is mid-transition to cloud and SaaS, with a lean engineering team carrying both product development and client support. The incoming CTO inherits a modernised frontend and a cloud migration in progress; the work ahead involves rearchitecting the data layer, embedding AI into compliance-driven workflows and transforming a manual support model into a scalable, automated one. This is a rare opportunity to define the technical future of an established vertical incumbent — with long-standing public sector relationships, genuine AI upside, and the full mandate to execute. This is a hands-on leadership role that balances strategic vision with practical execution in a specialist, regulated environment. What You Will Own Technology Strategy & Product Roadmap Define and own the company's technology strategy and multi-year product roadmap, in close collaboration with the CEO and Commercial Director. Ensure the software platform remains competitive, compliant, and aligned with the evolving needs of Spanish public sector institutions. Identify and prioritise AI use cases that deliver measurable value: automating routine processes within the product, enhancing reporting and analytics for public-sector clients, and improving the efficiency of support and delivery teams. Build practical AI capabilities into the product roadmap — such as intelligent workflow automation, predictive workforce analytics, and AI-assisted compliance monitoring — tailored to the needs of Spanish public health administrations. Partner with the product and commercial teams to translate client requirements — particularly those arising from public-sector contracts — into a clear, deliverable technical backlog. Technology and Architecture Define and execute the platform's technical vision, ensuring it is scalable, secure, and built for the next phase of growth. Drive platform modernisation: infrastructure, APIs, performance, and security posture. Lead adoption of AI-assisted development practices to increase engineering throughput and embed intelligent workflows into the product. Own security, compliance, and data privacy practices appropriate to the Spanish public sector and GDPR requirements. Leadership and Engineering Culture Lead and develop a high-performing engineering team [team size], hiring well, setting clear expectations, and developing the next layer of technical talent. Invest in reskilling the team for AI-native ways of working. Establish engineering best practices, development standards, and delivery rhythms that scale without bureaucracy. Champion the strategic adoption of Artificial Intelligence across the business — in the product, in client-facing features, and in internal operations. Stay ahead of developments in AI tooling, large language models, and automation platforms; evaluate and integrate relevant technologies into the company's stack in a responsible, compliant manner. Foster a culture of experimentation and continuous improvement, encouraging the engineering and support teams to embrace AI tools that augment their effectiveness. Client Support: Efficiency & AI-Driven Improvement Own the client support function, ensuring public sector clients receive timely, high-quality technical assistance in line with contractual SLAs. Drive a transformation of the support model using AI, automation, and self-service tooling to reduce ticket volume, accelerate resolution times, and free up the team to focus on complex, high-value client issues. Introduce AI-assisted triage, knowledge base tools, and intelligent routing to improve first-response quality and reduce dependency on manual intervention. Define and track support KPIs; report regularly to the CEO on support performance, client satisfaction, and efficiency trends. Ensure the support team has a deep understanding of the specific operational contexts of public healthcare clients — including payroll cycles, administrative calendars, and regulatory reporting periods that drive peak demand. Cross-Functional Partnership Serve as the CEO’s primary technology co-strategist on business direction, product decisions, and market positioning. Partner with the CEO and other internal teams to translate the product vision and roadmap into a technical strategy and execution plan. What We Are Looking For The CTO we are looking for is a proven SaaS engineering leader who has fundamentally rewired how they build and deliver software in the age of AI. This is not a traditional CTO role. It demands someone who holds deep technical expertise and engineering leadership in equal measure, leads with an AI-first approach, and is energised by transformation rather than threatened by it. They are close enough to the code and infrastructure to stay personally connected while bringing the leadership maturity that comes from having done this before in more operationally sophisticated organisations. They choose this environment because it offers s