Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

This charter defines the role of TechAbout's Chief Technology Officer (CTO) — what it owns, how it decides, and how its success is measured. It is written for every employee and leader, and for the clients and candidates who want to understand how we build. It describes the role, not any individual.

Mandate

The CTO owns TechAbout's technical direction and the health of everything we build and run — the web products and internet brands we operate, and the client work we deliver in web development, SEO, cybersecurity, and design. The mandate is simple to state and hard to earn: our technology should be sound, secure, and shippable. The CTO makes sure the systems behind our products, our client sites, and our own operations — including the ERPNext platform we run the business on — stay reliable, defensible, and fast to change.

Core Responsibilities

• Architecture and technical strategy. Set the technical direction, choose the core stack, and keep our systems coherent as we scale.
• Engineering standards and delivery quality. Define how we write, review, test, and ship code, and hold the bar for what "done" means. See Employment Practices & Placements for how technical roles are staffed.
• Security posture. Own the security of what we build and operate, aligning toward OWASP practices and ISO/IEC 27001 as reference standards. While the team is small, the CTO may also hold the CISO mandate; the full security programme lives in the security leadership charter and the Information Security book.
• Tooling and infrastructure. Own the platforms, environments, and developer tooling that let us build and run without friction.
• Technical hiring and mentoring. Raise the technical bar through hiring, code review, and growing engineers, in step with Learning & Development.
• Technical risk and build-vs-buy. Decide what we build, what we buy, and what technical debt we take on deliberately versus what we must retire.

Ship things that work, keep them secure, and make it easy to change them tomorrow.

Decision Rights

The CTO owns and approves: the core architecture and technology stack; engineering standards and the definition of quality; security controls and the response to security incidents; the choice of core tooling, hosting, and infrastructure; and build-vs-buy calls on technical components. The CTO escalates to the CEO and relevant leaders when a technical decision carries material budget, legal, contractual, or client-commitment weight — working with People leadership on hiring plans and with Finance on spend beyond agreed thresholds.

How Success Is Measured

• Reliability. Uptime and stability of the products and client systems we run, and how quickly we recover when something breaks.
• Delivery velocity. How predictably and quickly we ship quality work, and how low our rework and defect rates stay.
• Security. A shrinking backlog of known vulnerabilities, timely patching, and clean handling of any incident.
• Engineering health. Engineers who stay and grow, and a codebase that stays maintainable as it grows.

Who They Work With

The CTO partners closely with the CEO on company direction, with delivery and service leads on client commitments, with the security function (or holds it directly), with People/HR on technical hiring and growth, and with Finance on tooling and infrastructure spend. Internally, the CTO is the final technical escalation point for engineers and project leads.

Boundaries

The CTO does not set commercial pricing, own client relationships, or make final hiring decisions outside the technical craft — those sit with commercial, delivery, and People leadership respectively. The CTO does not provide legal interpretation; where a decision touches data protection, PECA, or contractual obligations, it is routed to qualified local counsel and reviewed against current law. The CTO sets the technical bar; it does not micromanage the day-to-day work of every team.

While the team is small and scaling, one person may currently hold this role together with the security leadership (CISO) mandate or other duties until the team grows.

Questions? Contact hr@techabout.com.