Fractional CTO & Tech Lead
Octapus is a buy / build cybersecurity and cloud platform, focused on the mid-market. We are backed by global institutional venture capital and private equity funds, as well as by world-class angel investors. As a buy-and-build platform, Octapus accelerates growth by acquiring and integrating strategic companies into a seamless, automated one-stop-shop platform. Our mission is to drive operational excellence while scaling our impact across Mexico, the US, and Colombia, where we currently operate, as well as the rest of Latam
The Role
As Fractional CTO, you will serve as our senior-most technical leader on a part-time engagement, providing hands-on architecture guidance, engineering leadership, and security oversight. You'll work closely with the GM, technical team engineers, and (if applicable) outside investors and customers to keep services & product secure, scalable, while helping us define the technical leadership profile and building the case for a full-time CTO hire. This is an interim, high-trust role: you'll set direction now and hand off a well-documented, healthy technical
What You'll Doorganization to your eventual full-time successor.
Technical & Security Leadership
● Own technical architecture decisions and roadmap prioritization in partnership with the GM and Cyber team
● Establish and maintain a security-first engineering culture: secure SDLC practices, code review standards, and threat modeling appropriate to a cybersecurity product.
● Assess and shore up the company's own security posture (infrastructure, access controls, data handling) — practicing what the product & services preaches
Team & Process
● Provide technical mentorship and career guidance to engineers.
● Set up (or right-size) engineering processes incident response — for a small team transforming to an A.I first model
● Help recruit and interview engineering and security hires, including your eventual full-time successor.
● Document architecture decisions, security practices, and technical debt so knowledge doesn't leave and when you do.
Strategic & Investor-Facing
● Advise the GM on technical strategy, build-vs-buy decisions, and resourcing tradeoffs.
● Represent technical credibility in investor conversations, board updates, and key customer/partner discussions as needed.
● Support compliance efforts relevant to a cybersecurity company selling to security-conscious buyers (e.g., SOC 2 readiness), coordinating with outside auditors or consultants as needed.
● Define the ideal profile, scope, and success criteria for the full-time CTO hire, and support the transition once they're onboarded.
About You
Experience
● Prior CTO, VP Engineering, or senior technical leadership experience at an early-stage or growth-stage startup, ideally in cybersecurity or another security-conscious space (fintech, healthtech, infrastructure).
● Track record of building and scaling engineering teams and architecture from early-stage to Series A/B maturity.
● Hands-on experience with the security domain relevant to the product (e.g., cloud security, identity and access management, threat detection, GRC/compliance tooling).
● Experience operating in a fractional, advisory, or interim capacity is a strong plus — you know how to make high-leverage impact in limited hours.
● Familiarity with compliance frameworks relevant to cybersecurity vendors (SOC 2, ISO 27001, NIST) and enterprise security review processes.
Skills & Traits
● Strong full-stack technical judgment paired with genuine security domain expertise — you can go deep on both the product and the security fundamentals.
● Comfortable operating with significant autonomy and ambiguity, and pragmatic about what a small team can realistically execute.
● Excellent communicator who can translate technical tradeoffs for a non-technical CEO, board, and customers.
● A mentor's instinct — able to level up founding engineers rather than just doing the work yourself.
● Comfortable being a transitional leader: motivated to build durable systems and documentation, not just personal indispensability.
Engagement Details
● Estimated commitment: 20 hours per week, with flexibility to flex up during critical periods (e.g., security incidents, audits, fundraising diligence).
● Engagement length: 6 months, with the expectation of transitioning to a full-time CTO hire within that window.
● Compensation: hourly/day rate or monthly retainer, plus potential equity/advisor grant.
● Location: Remote (LATAM Based)