Fractional CTO

About Contably

Contably is an early-stage startup building an all-in-one financial management and accounting platform for businesses in Bolivia and across South America. We are built around Bolivia's National Tax Service (SIN) electronic invoicing mandate as our initial compliance anchor — and expanding from there.

We are moving from pre-certification to production-grade, customer-ready scale. This is the moment we need a technical leader who can take ambiguity and turn it into something customers actually use and trust — at scale.

Role summary

The Fractional CTO owns technical strategy and execution across the entire engineering function. This person sets the architecture roadmap, decides the platform and tooling stack, builds and manages the engineering team (contractors and future hires), owns the engineering budget, and represents technical credibility to investors and other stakeholders.

This is an executive role that reports directly to the CEO with close collaboration with the founding team. Based in Mexico, working remotely across Latin American time zones.

Current stack

Core responsibilities

• Architecture strategy and planning: Define the technical roadmap for transitioning an MVP into a scalable fintech architecture. Own long-term system design and platform decisions. Anticipate where the current architecture will break under load or regulatory change. Translate rough product intent into structure, context, and specs that both humans and AI systems can execute against.
• Platform, tooling, and infrastructure decisions: Decide what infrastructure, third-party services, and internal tooling the team needs (cloud provider strategy across Supabase/AWS, CI/CD, monitoring, security tooling). Own strategic build-vs-buy decisions with sign-off from executive team.
• Engineering team hiring and management: Recruit, interview, and manage engineering contractors and future hires. Allocate people against roadmap priorities. Plan the team's growth curve against the company's stage.
• Budget and resource management: Own the engineering budget including contractor rates and infrastructure spend. Make resourcing tradeoffs and report on planning and spend to the founders.
• Technical operations: Own the overall technical support and incident management process for the production platform. Escalation point for root-cause follow-up and process improvement.
• Stakeholder management: Represent the technical team in executive leadership meetings. Be the technical voice in investor fundraising conversations. Translate engineering status and risk into terms founders and investors can act on. Manage relationships with any government/regulatory technical contacts tied to SIN certification.

Decision-making authority

The CTO has authority over day-to-day technical, architecture, and engineering execution decisions — including tooling choices, code review standards, and technical prioritization within the agreed roadmap and approved budget. Decisions with significant budget impact, shifts in overall technical strategy, or senior hires are made in partnership with the founding team.

Required qualifications

• Full-stack TypeScript fluency across the actual stack: React 18/Vite frontend, Deno (Supabase Edge Functions) and Node.js backend, SQL/Supabase Postgres including Row Level Security design
• Cloud infrastructure experience at production scale (AWS), with a track record of scaling infrastructure without full re-architecture
• Proven experience integrating with complex third-party, government, or financial systems APIs (banks, payment processors, or similar), including ambiguous error handling and resilient retry logic
• Bilingual English/Spanish, spoken and written
• Demonstrated leadership trajectory: increasing scope in past roles, clear method for giving leadership visibility into in-flight projects, managing and mentoring teammates, and experience bringing an off-track project back on course
• High business acumen and interpersonal skills to work across stakeholders, explain technical concepts to business audiences, and represent Contably with customers and investors

Preferred qualifications

• Fintech, tax, or regulatory compliance experience (highly desired)
• Prior experience with Bolivia's SIN system or e-invoicing mandates elsewhere in Latin America
• Experience auditing or architecting multi-tenant SaaS applications for data isolation
• Experience integrating AI-assisted development tools and workflows into an engineering team's practice
• Experience as part of a startup that has exited (highly desired)

Engagement details

Direct engagement through Contably. Compensation commensurate with experience. No travel anticipated during the fractional engagement. Mexico-based candidates strongly preferred for time zone alignment and LATAM market understanding.

This is initially a fractional/contract engagement. Depending on performance and Contably's progress against key business outcomes — including fundraising milestones — there is potential for the role to evolve into a full-time executive position as the company scales.