Chief Technology Officer

Snapbau is an AI-powered SaaS procurement platform built for the construction industry. In under a year, we’ve achieved strong traction in the Swiss market and are now entering a rapid scale-up phase with international expansion ahead.

We are building software for real-world construction environments — fragmented systems, low-connectivity job sites, fast operational workflows, and high execution pressure. The next phase of the company requires a deeply technical leader who can architect scalable systems while shipping production code daily.

This is a hands-on builder role for someone who wants to own architecture, infrastructure, engineering execution, and technical product evolution from the ground up.

The Role

We are looking for an experienced CTO / senior technical leader who combines strong product engineering instincts with pragmatic startup execution. This is not a delegation-only executive position. You will:

• writing production code daily
• defining system architecture
• building scalable infrastructure
• leading engineering execution
• hiring and mentoring the first engineering team
• translating real construction workflows into technical systems

You will work directly with the CEO and customers to build software that functions reliably in real operational environments.

Tasks

• Own system architecture and technical direction
• Build scalable multi-tenant SaaS systems across backend, APIs, infrastructure, and frontend
• Drive pragmatic architecture decisions balancing speed, scalability, and maintainability
• Ensure platform reliability, performance, and extensibility

• Develop production systems primarily with PHP 8.3+ and Laravel 13+
• Build APIs, async jobs, queue systems, caching, and event-driven services
• Contribute across frontend technologies including Vue.js, React, and Alpine.js
• Own debugging, monitoring, security, performance, and production reliability

• Design systems for low-connectivity, mobile-first construction environments
• Build offline-first workflows enabling real-time field-to-office collaboration
• Create reliable operational workflows for procurement, approvals, and tracking

• Build integrations with ERP and accounting systems, and auxiliary software providers i.e. Autodesk, etc
• Develop scalable APIs, interoperability layers, and construction data pipelines
• Own cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, databases, monitoring, and production environments across GCP/AWS

• Hire and mentor the first engineering team
• Establish engineering standards, development practices, and code quality
• Drive fast, high-quality execution in a startup environment

• Work closely with the CEO to translate operational workflows into product systems
• Assess technical feasibility and execution trade-offs
• Prioritize effectively between rapid shipping and long-term scalability

Requirements

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Proven experience as:
• CTO
• senior engineering leader
• or principal/full-stack engineer in a high-growth B2B SaaS company
• Strong track record building and scaling systems from early-stage through rapid growth
• Experience operating in startup environments with high ambiguity and rapid execution cycles
• Strong history of shipping complex systems into production

• Strong backend and infrastructure expertise
• Deep experience with PHP and Laravel in production environments
• Strong API architecture and systems integration experience
• Experience building scalable SaaS products and distributed systems
• Strong understanding of:
• databases
• caching
• asynchronous processing
• performance optimization
• production debugging
• Comfortable operating across backend, frontend, infrastructure, and cloud systems

• Strong ownership mentality from architecture to production deployment
• Bias toward shipping fast and iterating from customer feedback
• Pragmatic approach to technical trade-offs
• Comfortable making decisions with incomplete information
• Strong product intuition grounded in real user constraints

• Professional English required
• Fluent French required

Benefits

• Build at the intersection of AI, SaaS, and construction-tech
• Direct impact on a fast-growing product entering its next scale phase
• Shape technical architecture and engineering culture from the ground up
• Work closely with real users and see immediate operational impact
• Contribute directly to how AI will transform procurement and construction workflows
• Join a highly execution-oriented team with fast iteration cycles and visible outcome
• Significant growth opportunities into long-term technical leadership

• Not a pure executive or delegation-only CTO role
• Not an enterprise architecture role disconnected from product execution
• Not a theoretical systems design position without shipping responsibility
• Not an isolated engineering role detached from customers and field operations