About Us
The Steele Family Foundation and the WISE Earn to Learn Scholarship are dedicated to empowering "Stranded Superstars" through financial support, mentorship, and innovative educational programs. As we expand our impact, we are seeking a visionary Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to lead our technology initiatives. This is a unique opportunity to shape a one-of-a-kind digital experience that guides scholarship recipients from high school through their educational and professional journeys.
Position Overview
As our CTO, you will be a key leader in shaping our organization's future. You will lead the design, development, and implementation of our proprietary portal, a critical platform for our scholarship recipients. This role requires a creative, strategic leader who can execute big ideas and guide our technology teams to build a world-class digital experience.
As CTO, this person will serve as the senior technology architect and integration leader for The WISE Scholarship Program™. The role focuses on evaluating, licensing, integrating, and improving existing technologies rather than building a large internal development team or recreating systems from scratch. The CTO will turn organizational priorities into clear technical recommendations, budgets, timelines, scopes of work, vendor direction, and delivered results.
This is a full-time leadership position requiring consistent availability, strong preparation, professional communication, sound judgment, and timely follow-through.
Candidates must disclose outside employment, consulting work, business interests, or recurring professional commitments that could affect availability, confidentiality, or performance.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead the technological vision: Drive the overall technology strategy and roadmap, ensuring it aligns with our mission and long-term goals. Take ownership of assigned technology priorities and return to leadership with a clear explanation of what the solution looks like, what can be accomplished, what it will cost, the expected timeline, the risks, and the recommended next steps.
- Oversee our proprietary portal: Lead the development and implementation of our custom-built platform, ensuring it is a dynamic and effective tool for our students.
- Manage global partnerships: Oversee and manage licensing arrangements with other education software and AI-driven platforms globally, including negotiating agreements and ensuring seamless integration.
- Ensure international compliance: Work on compliance requirements internationally, developing and implementing strategies to ensure data security and adherence to global regulations (e.g., GDPR).
- Collaborate with WISE partners: Actively work with WISE partners to align technology initiatives with shared goals and leverage partnerships to enhance our platform.
- Lead and mentor teams: Lead external developers, software providers, and technology partners by establishing clear scopes, budgets, timelines, responsibilities, milestones, documentation requirements, and acceptance criteria.
- Innovate and integrate: Oversee the integration of cutting-edge technology to enhance our scholarship and educational initiatives.
- Advise on strategy: Provide insights on emerging technologies to inform our long-term strategic planning.
- Help manage the technology roadmap and move approved priorities from evaluation through scoping, budgeting, vendor selection, development, testing, and launch.
- Evaluate whether The WISE Scholarship Program™ should build, purchase, license, partner, or integrate, and provide leadership with a clear recommended path.
- Prepare written technology evaluations covering cost, timeline, value, security, maintenance, risk, vendor options, and next steps.
- Manage external developers and technology vendors through clear expectations, regular progress reviews, delivery accountability, and documented follow-up.
- Track cloud costs, software subscriptions, licensing expenses, vendor estimates, and development spending. Identify duplicated work, unclear scope, unnecessary spending, and opportunities for cost savings.
- Arrive prepared for leadership, vendor, and partner meetings with background information, questions, recommendations, risks, and decisions needed. Document responsibilities, deadlines, and follow-up actions after each meeting.
- Balance security and proper planning with urgency. Raise blockers early, present practical options, and keep approved work moving forward.
Qualifications
- Proven experience as a technology leader, with a strong track record of successful technology projects.
- Strong leadership, project management, and problem-solving skills.
- Extensive experience designing and implementing digital platforms, portals, or software solutions.
- Strong executive communication skills, with the ability to contribute meaningful questions, recommendations, and technical guidance during leadership, partner, and vendor meetings, take complete notes, and provide timely written follow-up.
- Experience managing external developers, software providers, technology vendors, budgets, timelines, risks, and delivery from planning through launch.
- Demonstrated experience integrating large language models and AI-enabled services into production software platforms through vendor APIs, third-party platforms, or licensed solutions. Strong understanding of system architecture, data flows, security, performance, usage-based pricing, licensing, long-term maintenance, model updates, and ongoing operating costs.
- Experience in global software licensing, intellectual property management, and international data privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR).
- Excellent communication and critical-thinking skills.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience working with nonprofits, education programs, or scholarship initiatives.
- Familiarity with AI agents, retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, vector databases, model monitoring, responsible AI practices, and AI-assisted software development tools.
- Experience with Power BI or comparable business intelligence and analytics platforms, including dashboards, reporting, data visualization, and AI-assisted insights.
Success During the First 90 Days: Present a clear CTO plan for the following 90 days before the probation review.
Why Join Us?
This is an opportunity to make a lasting impact on the lives of students and help build a brighter future for our "Stranded Superstars." You will play a critical role in shaping and strengthening our technology strategy, platform, partnerships, and integrations and be part of a mission-driven, passionate team.
How to Apply
If you are a visionary leader ready to drive our technological mission forward, we would love to hear from you. Please send your resume, a cover letter, and a portfolio or examples of past projects to [email protected].
Job Type: Full-time
Pay: From $150,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- 401(k)
- 401(k) matching
- Dental insurance
- Health insurance
- Paid time off
- Vision insurance
Work Location: In person
