Vetted Chief Technology Officers in California

“CTO-minded builder seeking to join a startup; previously created an AI-driven platform that abstracted away DevOps and infrastructure for drug discovery researchers. Emphasizes high-leverage, zero-to-one execution with managed cloud/open-source tooling, and a strong reliability/reproducibility mindset validated against existing scientific pipelines.”

“CTO-level leader with deep insurtech and cloud security/SaaS experience who has repeatedly scaled global engineering orgs and delivered high-velocity roadmaps. Most recently led Delos Insurance Solutions to launch new homeowners programs for wildfire-prone regions every 3–4 weeks while meeting DOI/SLA requirements, driving $135M GWP and $250M capacity and reaching cash-flow positive. Also led major scalability re-architecture at CloudPassage (Postgres to Cassandra + Kafka) and built a large Estonia-based engineering hub at Cybercube.”

“Engineering leader (Director of Development) with hands-on cloud and product experience who builds business-aligned technology roadmaps and scales teams. Delivered an enterprise cloud-migration enabler at UHG by implementing AD authentication and Terraform-based IaC for custom VM images while meeting 90-day InfoSec patch/rotation requirements, and drove a 20% lift in user consumption/retention by designing an interactive branded media portal experience for Sunkist.”

“Engineering leader (Octane) who drove business-aligned technology roadmaps and scaled a fully distributed engineering org from 35 to 150 in 9 months using a rigorous ownership model (OARP). Led a greenfield architecture for a new vertical (AWS Lambda/ECS, Python/JS/React) that delivered an MVP in 3 months while cutting per-service cloud OPEX from ~$300+ to ~$20/month, with 15+ years of remote-first leadership experience.”

“Technology leader with experience owning enterprise roadmaps and executing large-scale platform standardization during rapid M&A—most notably driving a tech roadmap across a 37-company portfolio at Regent, tackling technical debt and security gaps via unified cloud-native architecture, IAM/logging, CI/CD, and a global SRE model. Previously scaled an Adobe engineering org from 8 to 40+ across four regions, implementing clear org design, KPIs, and an extreme-ownership culture to support 24/7 operations and enterprise needs.”

“Entrepreneurial builder who created a SaaS system for insurance sales and developed in-house sales/marketing platforms, prioritizing a robust backend that drove over $500k in immediate sales before expanding features. Emphasizes lean, high-impact execution with strong focus on optimization, barrier management, and contingency planning.”

“Engineering/technology leader with mission-critical experience at JPL NASA on the Mars Curiosity Rover, delivering an AI-driven navigation system designed for zero tolerance for mistakes and reportedly operating with no failures for 15+ years. Also led a monolith-to-microservices, cloud-native migration that improved scalability by 300% and cut deployments from days to hours, and is comfortable switching between executive fundraising/stakeholder communication and deep technical leadership.”

“Founder/CTO who built and shipped a consumer subscription-bundling platform end-to-end (architecture, implementation, testing) and scaled it to thousands of customers and major partners. Previously led a major reliability overhaul at Chan Zuckerberg Initiative for a Google-Docs-like ed-tech product—boosted observability, introduced incident management, and migrated to a Docker-based scalable architecture. Heavy user of AI tools (Cursor/Claude) for development, testing, and code review, with a strong bias toward lightweight, fast-moving execution.”