Chief Technology Officer

Fully Remote | Offices available in Los Angeles & Houston

$300k base, plus bonus + benefits

This isn't your typical job ad, and we're not looking for your typical CTO. Interested? Let's dig in.

Who We Are

Our company was founded in 2006 specializing in all things technical for bus-based public transit systems in the US, then acquired by a larger Spanish firm in 2015. This means we design, manufacture, and manage all kinds of different products and features, including driver interfaces, dispatch communications, passenger counters, announcers, GPS tracking, and reporting & data analytics. It also means we build real-time information systems for riders including apps and digital signage found at bus stops. We have relationships with Apple Maps, Google Maps, Transit app, and our work goes out to millions of riders on those platforms. Our product is like air traffic control, but for buses. There are a mix of hardware and software products in this role. We hope this excites you!

The US-based division of the company has approximately 50 people. It’s the best of both worlds: small company feel with big company support. You’ll lead a team of 10 engineers (with room to grow) and responsibilities across front end, back end, embedded systems, and cloud infrastructure. You’ll be part of the product leadership team and senior management team and report to the Chief Product Officer.

This is our most senior technical leadership role in North America. You’ll directly manage engineering, own the technology strategy and execution, and work cross-functionally with other department heads to ensure company-wide alignment.

To learn more about our North America division, visit www.gmvtransit.com.

We are fully remote with offsites once or twice a year and physical offices that some folks choose to use in Downtown LA & Houston, TX. We’ll expect you to travel about quarterly for management or full-team meetings.

We’re here to serve customers

Our customers are public transit operators. Their customers are the transit riding public, which is often people who have far less than we do. Our job is to Make Transit Work for them. We take this mission very seriously, and to put it bluntly: we want a CTO who is here to solve problems and serve customers as our first priority. You must be prepared to be direct yet kind, assertive yet empathetic in advocating for technical solutions that are best for the customer. Expectations will be high for you to build and maintain internal relationships that help best meet external needs.

We don’t shy from tough internal conversations as long as it’s in service of our customers.

We’re looking for proven operational excellence

We’ve got a team of world-class engineers and are looking for a leader to guide us towards operational excellence. Your job is to bring clarity, rhythm, and accountability to the regular workings of our team.

You must have prior experience coaching growing teams with success in three key areas: reliable delivery of new features, ongoing system stability, and constructive relationships. To us, operational excellence means we have the ability to trust the delivery plans we make and the code we release to production. It’ll mean threading the needle between burdensome process and complete freedom, allowing engineers the space to develop creative solutions while collaborating and aligning on architecture and technical standards.

Our ideal candidate for this position has been a senior team lead / VP engineering / CTO for a smaller company and is comfortable with undefined process but experienced enough to level up our approach. You’ll have lots of authority and fewer guard rails, but expectations for your ability to manage uncertainty and institute operational excellence are high. We’re looking for a candidate who has coached technical leaders, led engineering offsites, and brought predictability to complex delivery pipelines.

You’ll build the process by which we go from idea to release with a clear sense of progress and high quality expectations.

Tech matters, but people matter more

We need someone who is empathetic, diplomatic, candid, direct, and kind, yet accountable. Listening skills are a must, personal relationships and 1-1's are vital. An even-ness of temperament and a professionalism of work ethic are the key ingredients. We'll expect you to provide peer references to help us evaluate this, and this is our #1 criteria.

• NET, C#, SQL, React, React Native, Android, iOS, Linux, Kubernetes, and more. Our stack serves our team and our team serves our users. Tech choices are made with people in mind. We build products for web users in an office, mobile users on the go, and bus drivers in a vehicle — our tech stack is as varied as our users. We’re looking for someone with experience across the stack, but more importantly who has proven ability to build and lead teams with varied expertise. We’re a small team with a wide stack and a product with a huge surface area, so we don’t adopt new technologies just for fun. You’ll be the guide ensuring that our architectural choices are long-term sustainable.
  
  

We make tech choices to best serve our customers with supportable, reliable, and continuously improving product functionality.

We’re an integrator of hardware and software

This isn’t your typical SaaS product just living in a web browser. We install rugged computers, displays, sensors, audio amplifiers, and more on vehicles. We connect to engine computers to read loads of data in real-time. We rely on flaky cellular connections to send data home. We have thousands of devices moving around all over the country. We believe that simple, readable code is good code – bringing clarity to the noisy environment in which it lives.

We’re looking for someone with hardware knowledge and experience delivering products for distributed devices. Whether it’s from IOT devices, automotive, robotics, audio, or other physical technology, it’s important to have a strong working knowledge of electricity and physical hardware. While we don’t expect previous experience in all of these areas, we need to know you can understand things like CANBUS, J1708, 12 vs 24-volt power, serial communications, video resolution, and speaker resistance.

At our core, we’re experts at putting together physical hardware with performant software, and you must be too.

Private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid

Our product is a multi-tenant solution that runs in the private cloud from an enterprise-grade data center. We own the hardware because it gives us the best control of cost and quality. We’re also running storage and backups in the public cloud via AWS, and we’re actively planning for the future of our environment, from disaster recovery to load balancing to SOC2-level cybersecurity. We’re looking for someone who understands the technical and business tradeoffs of public cloud hosting vs. running your own data center and has experience with both. You need to be able to craft and communicate long-term plans for site reliability that allow us to deliver an ever-expanding list of features to more customers while maintaining peak performance.

You think in systems. You can see how design decisions today affect supportability, reliability, and team velocity six months from now. You know how to scale not just infrastructure, but decision-making.

We take the long-term view of system architecture, and we want you to lay out the path forward.

You must be able to get your hands dirty when needed

We won't expect you to write code every day, but if you can't, you won't be able to manage and hold our team to its highest level of performance. You must be a senior engineer and prove it. In this role, you’ll build POCs, you’ll approve architecture designs, you’ll review code. You may even find yourself on a bus with our field team, and you need to be comfortable diving in to wiring and literally getting your hands dirty. We will have a practical test (and pay you for the time) and we expect you to demonstrate these abilities to us.

This is a hard requirement. We’re not looking for a hands-off manager.

Pay and Benefits

We can’t offer stock (not available from parent company), but we can offer cash comp, great benefits, and a career-making move for you.

• $300k plus 25% bonus potential
• Generous health and dental benefits
• Generous paid parental leave after one year
• 401k plan with company match
• Flexible hours and location
  
  

Most of our work happens on Slack, but once or twice a year we get together in person to collaborate within and across our teams. Our company is a small one with great culture, and you're going to have fun being a part of it.

You’ll have the chance to leave your mark on a mission-critical industry, shape a high-performing team, and define how we scale.

This is the kind of role that turns a great engineering leader into a transformational executive.

To apply, you must send more than a resume–we need to understand who you are

We don't need a formal sir or madam cover letter, but we do need to see you taking the application seriously, which means writing a note to us telling us why this job appeals to you and why you’ll appeal to us. Include specifics about your experience in our technologies (don’t just use keywords, tell us what clean code really means to you), why you believe you’re a strong leader, how you’ve built teams in the past, how you’ve driven operational excellence in those teams, and anything else that helps us get to know you as a person beyond your resume.

This In addition to completing the online application, email your note and resume to the hiring manager directly: careers-na [AT] gmv [DOT] com with the subject "Chief Technology Officer." The letter you write for us will be 10 times more valuable than your resume in getting our attention.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact Pablo Durán Álvarez, in charge of this vacancy.

Pablo Durán Álvarez