CTO (Chief Technology Officer)

About this role

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.