Chief Technical Officer

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.

We're looking for

• Ten years or more leading engineering organisations, including several years at Head of Engineering, VP Engineering, Chief Technical Officer or equivalent level, managing managers.
• Experience running systems where failure is expensive and visible, such as high-traffic consumer platforms, payments, ticketing or comparable transactional infrastructure.
• Evidence of raising delivery pace in an existing organisation: a team that ships more, more safely, than it did when you arrived.
• Genuine AI fluency in engineering practice. You have changed how a team works with AI tooling and can be specific about what improved and what did not.
• Strong architectural judgement and a track record of simplifying systems while improving both reliability and speed.
• Strength in both web and native mobile engineering, or the judgement to lead one credibly without having built it yourself.
• Experience with payments, financial flows or regulated data, and comfort working to a policy framework set by Finance.
• The judgement to distinguish real technical debt from work that is simply old, and to sequence rebuilds without stopping the business.
• Experience taking on an existing team and improving it, rather than only building from scratch.
• Clear, direct communication with non-technical people. You can explain a trade-off to the Board without dressing it up or dumbing it down.
• Experience in ticketing, marketplaces, events, music or media is an advantage.
• A passion for electronic music and an interest in the global electronic music community.

What we offer you

• Generous annual leave policies aimed at promoting work-life balance.
• Flexibility in working arrangements, offering hybrid or remote work options based on role requirements and location.
• Matching pension schemes and/or 401k.
• Comprehensive staff wellbeing initiatives, featuring regular activities and workplace programmes to support mental and physical health. This includes discounted ClassPass memberships and custom-fitted earplugs.
• Company-led social events, team lunches, and discounts on RA merch.
• Paid annual volunteering allowance, encouraging contributions to community projects and charities you care about.
• Regular company-wide Q&A's with senior leadership, along with ongoing virtual educational training sessions for all staff.
• A transparent internal company culture committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (see: https://ra.co/about/diversity).
• Active involvement in community projects within the electronic music community (see: https://ra.co/about/community).

More about RA

As an independent company run by devoted dance music enthusiasts, our mission is to bring together the world's electronic music communities. Our Global Content Network (GCN) and international teams help us establish connections with hyper-niche local scenes.

We became B-Corp certified in 2024, which counts us among businesses leading a global movement for an inclusive, equitable, and regenerative economy and part of a community that meets high social and environmental impact standards.

We especially welcome applicants from diverse backgrounds, abilities, ethnicities, experiences, gender identities, and sexual orientations. We aim for our team to reflect the communities we engage with. We ensure everyone is valued and respected by actively promoting equality, diversity, and inclusion in our workplace.

Our values

• Electronic music is art.
• We celebrate the progressive values that underpin electronic music.
• We advocate for a more inclusive and equitable electronic music community.
• We honour the past, present and future of electronic music.
• We use innovation to empower the community.
• We choose honesty over gain and purpose over profit.
• We're always front left.

This role is a permanent, full-time position based in London at our Head Office. Please note: this position requires applicants to be based in London and to work from the office three days per week. The annual salary range for this role is £100,000 to £120,000. If you have questions about the role, please contact work@ra.co.

This listing will be open for a minimum of two weeks from the 4th September. Please be sure to add work@ra.co to your contacts and check your junk/spam folder for emails from us.