Vetted Chief Technology Officers in California

“Senior engineering leader and architect with 15+ years of experience building organizations and cloud-native platforms across cybersecurity, healthcare, fintech, and enterprise software. At A10 Networks, he served as the principal architect while managing 30+ engineers, delivering a multi-tenant SaaS platform and AI-powered DDoS product in under a year, then migrating legacy products and enterprise customers onto the new foundation.”

Shady Ashkar

Screened

Executive Technology & Engineering Leader specializing in SaaS, FinTech and HealthTech

Orange County, CA30y exp

“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.”

“Bootstrapped-startup CTO and former founding engineer who has built products end-to-end as a solo developer across web and games. Led Grublify’s Next.js/TypeScript site (Strapi + Shopify), including a blog that reached ~5k monthly visitors and performance work like progressive loading/infinite scroll. Also implemented a resilient USDA nutrition ingestion pipeline with retries, partial-failure handling, and computed nutrient metrics.”

Josh Rhoades

Screened

Executive Technology Leader (CTO) specializing in AI-enabled SaaS and regulated platforms

Los Angeles, CA30y exp

“Senior engineering leader with experience at Disney and BlackLine who drives business-aligned technology roadmaps through deep Product/Engineering partnership (two-in-a-box) and pragmatic prioritization frameworks. Has led major modernization initiatives—private-to-public cloud migration to GCP with multi-cloud evolution, data-layer performance improvements (Mongo/Redis, caching/query optimization), and tooling upgrades (VSS to GitHub)—while scaling teams with strong quality and accountability culture.”

“Senior engineering leader in healthcare AI who combines org scaling with deep hands-on architecture work. At DriveHealth.ai, they helped evolve isolated workflows into a production-grade intelligent platform, standardizing a shared RAG+DCE architecture while leading teams of 50+ across engineering, AI, platform, QA, and DevOps.”

“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.”