We are hiring a CTO for one of our UK software businesses: an established company with a long track record and a leading share of its market.
The business has deep customer loyalty and a hard technology problem. It runs a large, mission-critical on-premises estate and is developing a new cloud platform, and it now has the backing to rebuild for the next 20 years. This CTO will lead that rebuild.
This role has two modes. With the established team running the existing products, you lead through managers and team leads; daily production coding is not expected, but you must be able to review architecture and step in to steer major incidents. In the small, elite squad rebuilding the platform, you will be more hands-on.
You will own all technology in the business: product engineering, QA, DevOps and cloud, data, and infrastructure.
ABOUT TAG SOFTWARE GROUP:
TAG Software Group is a team of experienced investors and operators dedicated to acquiring, enhancing, and growing mission-critical software companies serving SMB, enterprise, and public sector customers.
Founded as part of a permanent home for software companies, we don’t buy to sell. Our focus is on long-term partnerships that protect your legacy, employees, and customers.
Our in-house team delivers an efficient, transparent, and seller-friendly process, ensuring speed and certainty of close. Once part of TAG, your company gains access to proven best practices, dedicated value-creation resources, and the extended ecosystem of our sister companies, including proprietary in-house technology including and — helping your business reach the next level.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:
Run and stabilize the current estate
- Lead a production team of 20+ engineers, testers, product and platform staff.
- Set priorities, delivery cadence and metrics: velocity, quality, release predictability, cost per product line.
- Keep a mission-critical on-premises estate secure, supported and compliant.
- Run clear programme governance: every initiative has an owner, plan, budget and honest monthly reporting to the MD.
- Own reliability: incident response, postmortems and support escalation, building a team that handles incidents without you.
Build the next-generation platform with a lean, AI-first team
- Build a small, senior, AI-native engineering team using AI-assisted development.
- Rebuild the core product as a best-in-class cloud platform that aims to be number one in the UK market.
- Work hands-on inside the new-platform squad: set the architecture, write and review code if needed, and set the engineering standard.
- Make AI development tools part of every engineer's daily work, across both the legacy and new teams.
Lead the move from on premises to cloud
- Own the migration strategy for a large installed customer base, including sequencing, integration and data migration.
- Keep NHS integrations, accreditations and clinical-safety obligations intact throughout.
- Consolidate hosting and infrastructure and reduce the hardware and network footprint our customers carry.
Technical environment
- On-premises platform: Mainly C++ , C# and Java; .NET Framework; Microsoft SQL Server; Windows Server; installed at each customer site
- Cloud platform: multi-tenant SaaS on Microsoft Azure; C#, ASP.NET Core, React; Kubernetes (AKS); PostgreSQL,
- Hardware: company-supplied terminals, handheld scanners and printers; dispensing-robot integrations; NHS HSCN network connectivity; field engineering and workshop
Requirements
- 8+ years in software engineering, including 4+ years leading teams.
- Still hands-on enough to work inside a small, elite squad.
- Personally, led a migration of paying customers from on premises to multi-tenant SaaS.
- Strong Microsoft stack background: C#/.NET, SQL Server, Azure; able to assess legacy C++ and .NET Framework code.
- Using AI development tools in your daily work is expected. You know how to get the most from them for yourself and your team, and can show the impact on delivery
- Track record of hard calls: restructuring teams, stopping failing projects, managing R&D to a P&L.
- Explains technical trade-offs clearly and rooted in commercial rationale.
Benefits
- A rare chance to build a market-leading product with a loyal customer base already in place.
- High autonomy within a decentralized operating structure.
- Career growth within a rapidly expanding Valsoft ecosystem.
- Permanent ownership: Valsoft holds its businesses indefinitely, so you build for the long term, not for an exit.
- A peer network of CTOs and engineering leaders across Valsoft's 150+ software companies.
- Remote work flexibility.
#TagSoftwareGroup
New Zealand