CTO

Note: as one progresses along a career path, one should possess and show all qualities of levels below.

Years of Experience: 14+

Knowledge & Technical Skill

• Has deep engineering knowledge across technology stacks, drawn from experience across industries, languages, and architectural trends

• Has extensive management experience; able to lead and manage individual contributors, team managers, and directors

• Able to gain context rapidly in new technological environments

Impact & Output

• Purview is all engineers, Director of Engineering, VP of Engineering, and IT

• Influences technology strategy in near-, mid-, and long terms, taking into account strategic vision, business conditions, and budgetary trends

• Establishes long-range objectives and criteria for monitoring progress and measuring success

• Builds and sustains a healthy engineering culture through constant learning, a sane work environment, creative recruiting, and good long-term technology bets

• Responsible for multiple budget lines across staffing, hosting, backups, office IT, and consultants

• Contributes code only to carve out new areas of research, or to help in emergencies

• Fluent on organization's operational structure, funding model, success stories and value proposition, with the ability to speak to any internal or external question or challenge; shares this deep experience and knowledge to support the work of others

Communication

• Owns the communication of the organization's technical history and future

• Ensures that every person making a technical decision has the necessary business context

• Is an important public face of the company at conferences, panels, and other events

• Builds recruiting pipeline by increasing the org's public image as a technology organization

Leadership

• Priority and focus is on executives, then engineering organization

• Leads organization across multiple disciplines, with flexibility to meet the needs of the organization, even if those needs are well outside core skillset

• Ensures that the organization's technology competencies and commitments serve its long-term strategy

• Provides stewardship for the organization, taking care of DoSomething's culture, identifying and solving organizational challenges that affect DoSomething's long term health, acting as a guardian for the organization

• Develops and maintains strategic relationships outside the organization that create opportunities and open new avenues of impact