Interim Chief Technology Officer — SaaS Platform Rearchitecture

The mandate

A flagship enterprise deployment failed performance and data-isolation tests, causing the customer to suspend rollout and the board to remove the CTO. Engineering teams disagree whether to separate workloads, refactor shared services or pursue a wholesale rewrite, while contracted commitments continue.

The interim is expected within four weeks for twelve months. A permanent search starts once the target architecture and investment envelope are agreed; a possible extension is limited to eight weeks if the successor joins after the first reference deployment.

Handover requires the affected customer to accept a controlled relaunch, two comparable tenants to meet scale and isolation tests, platform reliability to stay within SLOs for a quarter, and the successor to approve the remaining architecture roadmap. No rewrite may remain dependent on undocumented interim judgement.

The interim may stop releases, set architecture standards, reassign engineering capacity and direct ₹22 crore within the approved recovery portfolio. A full product rewrite, cloud commitment above ₹35 crore, permanent vice-president appointments, customer credits over ₹5 crore and material delivery-date renegotiation need CEO or board approval.

New product categories, geographic data-residency expansion and redesign of go-to-market are excluded. The role must fix the enterprise platform path without consuming every product team or promising commercial outcomes beyond technology control.

Why this seat is open

The failed launch made the former architecture thesis a board-level issue rather than a routine engineering dispute. Current leaders advocate solutions aligned with the components they own. A seasoned interim CTO can make bounded choices and prove them before a permanent leader inherits the platform.

What you will own

• Quantify the failure envelope across load, noisy-neighbour effects, data isolation, recovery and deployment dependencies.
• Decide the target remediation path and document rejected alternatives, cost, sequencing and reversibility.
• Allocate engineering capacity between customer containment, shared-platform repair and essential roadmap obligations.
• Set non-functional acceptance tests for enterprise tenancy and refuse launches that cannot reproduce test conditions.
• Govern the reference deployment through architecture exceptions, live observability, rollback readiness and customer evidence.
• Prove quarterly SLO performance and isolation across two additional tenants before declaring platform recovery.
• Transfer decision records, residual debt, cloud commitments, customer exceptions and the funded architecture sequence to the successor.

Candidate qualifications

• Served as CTO, engineering chief or platform director in multi-tenant enterprise SaaS at meaningful scale.
• Recovered a failed enterprise deployment involving performance, tenancy or data-isolation constraints.
• Chosen between refactor, separation and rewrite paths using quantified operating and commercial evidence.
• Directed several hundred engineers while protecting critical customer commitments during architecture change.
• Negotiated technical acceptance with sophisticated enterprise buyers and independent security teams.
• Has handed a partially completed platform transformation to permanent leadership through explicit decision records.

Non-negotiables

• Available for Hyderabad leadership within four weeks.
• No active commercial interest in the current cloud provider or principal engineering supplier.
• Will disclose platform failures and material customer credits incurred under prior authority.
• Must retain the ability to stop a committed launch on isolation or resilience grounds.

1. 49 words maximum. State your earliest start and any cloud or SaaS conflict.
2. 49 words maximum. Describe a platform rewrite you rejected or bounded, and the evidence behind that choice.
3. 49 words maximum. Which tenancy test would you make non-waivable before an enterprise relaunch?