Qualified candidates must apply by sending their resume and cover letter to [email protected].
General Description
Synoptic Data is a Public Benefit Corporation with a mission of providing access to Real-Time weather and environmental data to support decisions that save lives, protect property, and enhance our understanding of Earth systems. Our vision is to be the world's largest and most trusted source for real-time global weather and environmental data.
Synoptic Data is seeking a hands-on, commercially minded Chief Technology Officer to lead the company's technology and engineering organization. This is a new role and the CTO will be responsible for technology strategy, engineering execution, platform architecture, cybersecurity, reliability, scalability, technical talent, and the disciplined commercialization of new capabilities.
This is not a purely advisory, research-oriented, or visionary-only position. At Synoptic's current scale, the CTO must also perform many responsibilities traditionally associated with a Vice President of Engineering, moving effectively between executive strategy, architecture decisions, engineering management, customer discussions, operational oversight, and delivery execution.
The CTO will work closely with the CEO, Product Manager, Chief Innovation Officer, customer-facing teams, and engineering leaders to translate company strategy, customer requirements, and innovation opportunities into secure, scalable, supportable, and commercially valuable production systems. The CTO will be expected to preserve Synoptic's entrepreneurial culture while introducing the planning, accountability, and technical discipline required to support larger government and commercial customers and continued growth.
As a PBC and certified B Corporation, in addition to a focus on revenue, Synoptic is accountable to all stakeholders, including data providers, data users, employees, communities, and the public. With significant government and commercial contracts in place, Synoptic is accelerating growth domestically and internationally.
Synoptic is a 100% remote company distributed throughout the U.S. This role is remote and will require meaningful overlap with U.S. business hours, as well as periodic travel (3 to 5 times per year) for company, customer, partner, industry, and Board meetings. Candidates should be proactive, self-directed, accountable, comfortable operating with limited bureaucracy, and effective in both internal and external settings.
At Synoptic, we believe in authentic interactions and equitable opportunities. We base our selection on a candidate's skills, knowledge, experience, judgment, and alignment with our mission. To ensure the integrity and fairness of our interview process, the use of artificial intelligence tools, including generative AI, or other means to generate or assist with responses during interviews is strictly prohibited.
Essential Job Functions
Technology and Engineering Leadership
- Develop and execute a multi-year technology strategy aligned with Synoptic’s business goals, mission, product roadmap, and customer commitments.
- Lead software engineering, data engineering, cloud infrastructure, DevOps, architecture, databases, security, and platform operations.
- Establish scalable, secure, reliable, maintainable, and cost-effective architecture for Synoptic’s environmental data platform, APIs, real-time ingestion systems, analytics, and customer applications. Current technical team is 16 people
- Improve delivery predictability, technical quality, documentation, testing, deployment, and change-management practices.
- Balance customer commitments and product development with reliability, cybersecurity, scalability, maintenance, and technical-debt reduction.
Reliability, Security, and Operations
- Ensure the availability, performance, resilience, integrity, and recoverability of Synoptic’s production systems and data services.
- Meet or exceed performance objectives for uptime, API response, data latency, incident response, and recovery.
- Strengthen monitoring, observability, release management, disaster recovery, business continuity, and incident-learning practices.
- Provide executive oversight of cybersecurity, technology risk, ISO, SOC, privacy, quality, and customer requirements.
- Optimize cloud and technology spending without compromising performance or reliability.
Product, Customers, and Innovation
- Partner with Product leadership to translate customer needs and market opportunities into a prioritized, executable roadmap.
- Provide credible estimates, technical alternatives, tradeoffs, and capacity constraints.
- Validate technical commitments and limit unnecessary customer-specific platform customization.
- Support strategic customer, partner, prospect, and proposal discussions.
- Partner with the Chief Innovation Officer to evaluate and commercialize emerging technologies, artificial intelligence, analytics, research, and prototypes.
Organization and Executive Leadership
- Build and develop a high-performing, accountable, and responsive engineering organization.
- Recruit, retain, coach, and develop technical talent while establishing clear roles, performance expectations, succession plans, and decision authority.
- Reduce key-person dependency through documentation, cross-training, and leadership development.
- Serve on the executive leadership team and advise the CEO and Board on technology strategy, cybersecurity, platform risk, investment, and growth.
- Support budgeting, strategic planning, partnerships, acquisitions, investment discussions, and technical due diligence.
- Provide operational responsiveness outside normal business hours when required.
Required Qualifications
- Fifteen or more years of progressive technology or engineering experience, including at least five years in a CTO, Vice President of Engineering, or comparable leadership role.
- Advanced degree in a technical field in Computer Science, Data Science, etc preferred.
- Demonstrated success leading multidisciplinary engineering teams in a growing software, SaaS, cloud, data-platform, or technology-enabled company.
- Strong knowledge of cloud platforms, APIs, distributed systems, real-time data pipelines, databases, DevOps, observability, reliability, and secure software development.
- Experience building and operating highly available, customer-facing production systems.
- Experience with generative AI tools and applying data science, artificial intelligence, or machine learning to environmental, atmospheric, scientific, or comparable data.
- Experience in Agile methodology, tools such as JIRA, Confluence, etc. a must.
- Ability to balance delivery, architecture, security, scalability, reliability, cost, and technical debt.
- Strong business judgment and the ability to connect technology decisions with customer value, revenue, risk, and company strategy.
- Experience communicating with enterprise and government customers, Boards, investors, partners, and nontechnical executives.
- Demonstrated ability to recruit, develop, and retain strong technical talent.
- Excellent written, verbal, interpersonal, and executive communication skills.
Desired Qualifications
- Experience with weather, environmental, geospatial, sensor, scientific, or high-volume observational data.
- Experience with real-time ingestion systems, commercial APIs, data-as-a-service platforms, and cloud-native architectures.
- Experience supporting government, regulated, or security-conscious customers.
- Familiarity with ISO 27001, SOC 2, FEDRAMP, quality-management systems, and security audits.
- Experience preparing a technology organization for rapid growth, investment, acquisition, integration, or technical due diligence.
- Experience or passion to be in a mission-oriented, B Corporation, or Public Benefit Corporation environment.
Compensation and Benefits
Synoptic provides industry-competitive executive compensation commensurate with experience, responsibilities, and market conditions. Benefits include a flexible time-off/vacation policy, comprehensive health insurance plans with HSA contributions, retirement contributions, and parental leave.
ADA Physical and Mental Requirements
Regular reading, writing, speaking, and understanding English. Frequent interactions require strong interpersonal skills, teamwork, customer service, leadership, and discretion. Regular decision making, independent judgment, problem analysis, prioritization, and communication of complex information. Frequent talking, sitting, hearing, video conferencing, and keyboarding. Occasional lifting, bending, carrying, and business travel.
Additional Information
Synoptic offers talented and motivated individuals the opportunity to do important work in a dynamic and growing Public Benefit Corporation determined to make a difference. Synoptic believes that each employee makes a significant contribution to our success. Therefore, this job description is designed to outline primary duties and qualifications, but not limit the employee or the organization to only the work identified. Our expectation is that every employee will contribute wherever reasonably necessary to support our growth and success and that of our clients, customers, partners, and stakeholders.
Synoptic maintains a discrimination-free work environment where employees are treated with dignity and respect. Our team members share responsibility for and commitment to equal employment opportunity. Synoptic does not discriminate based on age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. We adhere to these principles in all aspects of employment, including recruitment, hiring, training, compensation, promotion, evaluation, and benefits. Synoptic provides reasonable accommodation to qualified employees who have protected disabilities to the extent required by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances where a particular employee works.
Work Location: Remote
