Who We Are Scratch Financial (“Scratch”) is a late stage venture-backed financial technology business based in Pasadena, California. Backed by Norwest.
About the role
We're looking for a Chief Technology Officer who can lead our engineering, infrastructure, and security functions (~30 person team) through that process — building the operational maturity, technical standards, and team capability needed to stand up to diligence, while keeping the organization stable and motivated through the change.
What they're looking for
- Has led a company through a sale on the sell side, including hands-on experience preparing for diligence — this is not something we can teach on the job
- Has personally built observability, alerting, and security systems from near-ground-zero — not simply inherited and maintained existing systems
- Has led a security function directly, with real exposure to audits and compliance processes
- Has hands-on experience with agentic AI development and can speak to where it's genuinely being applied, not just discussed
- Comes from a background in distributed cloud backends, database scaling, and API architecture — this is not a fit for candidates whose experience is primarily mobile app or front-end/client-side engineering
- If several years removed from a hands-on technical or coding role, that's workable, a decade or more away from technical work is not
More about this role
We're looking for a Chief Technology Officer who can lead our engineering, infrastructure, and security functions (~30 person team) through that process — building the operational maturity, technical standards, and team capability needed to stand up to diligence, while keeping the organization stable and motivated through the change.
This is a hands-on leadership role, not a strategy-only seat. You'll spend meaningful time in the weeds — reviewing architecture, unblocking teams, and setting the technical bar — while building the structure, delegation, and bench strength that lets the org run without you as the bottleneck.
- Build engineering process and operational maturity from the ground up — architecture, coding standards, CloudOps, GitOps, and security practices — closing our current gaps in monitoring, alerting, and observability rather than inheriting and coasting on what exists today.
- Revitalize and run our security function — own security as a first-class function, including audits, compliance readiness (e.g., SOC2/GDPR/HIPAA-type frameworks), application hardening, and incident response, not as an afterthought bolted onto engineering.
- Bring a credible AI and...
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