Job at a glance
About RA Founded in 2001, Resident Advisor (RA) is one of the world's longest-running music media brands and a cornerstone of the dance, electronic and DJ ecosystem. The site's audience of over 7 million monthly users is drawn in by a combination of news, editorial, club listings and ticketing, RA-branded events at venues and festivals worldwide, original films and a weekly mix series that has run for 20 years.
Purpose of the role RA runs a global ticketing marketplace. Money moves, tickets scan at the door, and events sell out in minutes. The Chief Technical Officer owns the systems behind that: engineering across web, apps and core platform, the infrastructure underneath, and how quickly and safely RA can ship. This is an engineering role rather than a product one. Product strategy, roadmap, design and customer support sit with the Chief Platform Officer.
The Chief Platform Officer decides what gets built and why; the Chief Technical Officer owns how it gets built, how fast it ships and whether it stays up. That includes the apps: the Chief Platform Officer sets the product direction for the RA Guide and Scanner, and this role owns their engineering. The two roles work as a close partnership, and we will be looking for evidence that you can do that well.
We want an engineering leader who has already rebuilt a team around AI tooling and knows what actually changed: not the pitch, but the measured difference in how work gets estimated, reviewed, tested and shipped. RA is a small company with a large global surface area, and the leverage has to come from how the engineering organisation works rather than from headcount. You will inherit a capable team and a platform midway through significant change.
There is real work to do on both, and the freedom to do it. You will own Engineering, DevOps, Core Platform and Apps. Key responsibilities Own engineering delivery across web, mobile and core platform. Set how work is scoped, estimated, reviewed, released and verified in production, and be accountable for the pace and quality of what ships. Own the technical architecture and the multi-year plan for it.
Decide what gets rebuilt, replaced or left alone, and be clear about the cost of each. Own reliability, performance and security, with ticketing and payments held to the highest standard. On-sale peaks, settlement correctness and data protection are what the business plans around. Own the technical side of payments: gateway integrations, pay-in and pay-out infrastructure, fraud tooling, and the systems that enforce risk and compliance rules.
Finance owns provider selection, payout policy, risk appetite and regulatory obligation. This role builds and runs the systems that deliver it. Own developer effectiveness and set the risk model for shipping. Different changes carry different blast radii, and process should match risk. Heavy process is usually a symptom of a weak pipeline rather than a fix for one. Build AI into how RA engineers, across tooling, code review, testing and delivery.
Where AI raises throughput, own whether estimation and backlog depth have been rebased to absorb it, so gains become shipped work rather than idle capacity. Partner with the Chief Platform Officer on delivery planning, scoping, backlog readiness and technical trade-offs. Product ambition and engineering capability need to move together, and the Chief Technical Officer is the person who says plainly when they have pulled apart.
Assess and develop the engineering leadership you inherit. Build the layer beneath you, own technical hiring and the engineering bar, and reduce the number of things that depend on any single person. Own build-versus-buy decisions and RA's technology spend, including vendors, infrastructure cost and the sequencing of major investment. Set the engineering metrics that matter across delivery, reliability, incidents and developer effectiveness, and use them to improve the system rather than to produce reporting.
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