# Chief Technology Officer at Scratch Financial

- Company: Scratch Financial
- What the company does: Who We Are Scratch Financial (“Scratch”) is a late stage venture-backed financial technology business based in Pasadena, California. Backed by Norwest.
- Company website: https://scratchpay.com/
- Type: Startups
- Level: Principal and up
- Location: Pasadena, CA
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $300K to $350K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-08-07
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://ats.rippling.com/scratch-financial/jobs/c2ac3267-5df6-41f4-b525-9dcf2b948160
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/scratch-financial-chief-technology-officer/

## 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

Tags: Engineering