CTO in London

We're building the go-to platform for real football fans, a centralised home where trusted and passionate supporters can share their voices, insights, and emotions without being drowned out by pundits or fragmented across social media. Our mission is to amplify the perspectives of those who live and breathe the game, and to create a space where genuine fan sentiment drives the conversation. This is a really exciting opportunity to join the founding team and be a really important part of driving our success.

The Role

We're looking for both a hands‑on and strategic CTO to lead the next phase of Fanalysis' product and tech journey. This is a pivotal role at the heart of a fast‑scaling startup that sits at the intersection of fan engagement, real‑time community sentiment, and data infrastructure. You’ll be responsible for building and scaling a consumer‑facing mobile app that thousands of football fans use simultaneously, architecting the backend systems that support both the product experience and the delivery of high‑integrity, time‑sensitive data to our media and commercial partners, and defining how AI and automation reshape every layer of the business.

This isn’t about adding AI features as an afterthought. We’re looking for someone who sees AI‑native architecture as foundational, from how we build internal tools and workflows, to how we moderate content, surface insights, and deliver value to partners. You’ll lead our thinking on agentic systems, using AI to automate operational processes, accelerate development cycles, and create intelligent products that learn and adapt.

You’ve been through scale before, whether it was growing a consumer app from 0 to 100,000+ users, or solving real‑time performance issues during high‑traffic peaks. You understand how to balance fast iteration with technical robustness, and how to design systems that power both fan‑facing experiences and data products with serious SLAs. You’ll build and lead a lean, high‑performing tech team, set the roadmap for infrastructure and tooling, and AI capabilities, and work closely with product, commercial, and data teams to bring the Fanalysis vision to life.

About You

• You've led the technical build of a consumer‑facing mobile app, ideally with a strong community or data component.
• You've scaled a platform through high growth, handling issues like concurrency, latency, caching, and load balancing under pressure.
• You're fluent in data architecture and know how to design data stacks, APIs, and dashboards that deliver timely, accurate insights to clients.
• You've worked on or built a B2B data platform, including delivery to third‑party clients under SLAs.
• You're confident balancing speed of delivery with tech debt management and long‑term scalability.
• You have a clear point of view on how AI transforms product development, internal operations, and team structure.
• You've implemented AI/ML in production, whether for content moderation, recommendations, NLP, or operational automation.
• You're excited by agentic AI and understand how autonomous systems can handle workflows end‑to‑end, not just assist.
• You've built or led cross‑functional engineering teams, and know how to attract, motivate, and retain top tech talent.
• You're comfortable working with commercial partners to scope out data needs, debug delivery issues, and keep systems accountable.
• You're collaborative, low‑ego, and motivated by building something that genuinely improves the fan experience.

Bonus: experience working in sport, media tech, or startups with high fan or user emotion at their core.

Bonus: hands‑on experience with LLMs, vector databases, real‑time ML inference, or agentic frameworks.

This is a full‑time role based in London. Our office is in Soho and we believe in the benefits of working together, so ideally you’d be able to join us in the office at least 3 days a week.