Chief of Staff to the CTO

<div class="content-intro"><p>Altana is the network for trusted trade. Our AI-powered product network empowers governments and businesses to build a more resilient and secure global economy while keeping trade flowing.</p></div><p><strong>The Opportunity at Altana</strong></p> <p><em>This role is a force multiplier for the CTO and the Product, Engineering, and Implementation leadership team. You operate as an extension of the CTO, absorbing context across every workstream, making real prioritization calls, wielding real authority, and running the operating system of a technical org that ships to both commercial and government customers around the world. </em></p> <p><em>Beyond execution, you hold the business of the Product/Eng org: its operating cadence, its budget, and its people planning, in partnership with Finance and the People team. </em><em>You also build and lead the org’s Program Management Office: a team of technical program managers who run the portfolio of cross-functional programs and customer deliveries.</em></p> <p><em>This is a position of operational ownership and trusted judgment; ensuring the technical functions are aligned with Altana’s business strategy and corporate governance. Where the role touches comp, leveling, org design, and budget, you apply the frameworks the People CoE and Finance own. You are the CTO's embedded counterpart to those functions, not a parallel authority.</em></p> <p><strong>You Will</strong></p> <p><em>In this role, you will own:</em></p> <ul> <li><strong>Strategic projects.</strong> Lead or staff high-priority critical organizational initiatives identified by EPD leadership. </li> <li><strong>Operating cadence.</strong> Staff meetings, roadmap planning and portfolio reviews, metrics reviews, and leadership offsites — set agendas, drive follow-through, document and distribute decisions.</li> <li><strong>PMO leadership. </strong>Build and lead a team of technical program managers. Hire, develop, and set the bar for the function, and decide where TPMs are embedded versus centrally deployed.</li> <li><strong>Portfolio and delivery. </strong>Own the portfolio view of in-flight programs and customer deliveries, intake and prioritization, and delivery standards (planning, status, risk and dependency tracking, launch readiness, government contract reporting), plus the tooling that makes delivery health visible.</li> <li><strong>Cross-functional integration.</strong> Across the various sub-teams within Product, Engineering, Implementation and our public and private sector delivery motions — surface where priorities collide and force resolution.  </li> <li><strong>Decision and information flow. </strong>What reaches the CTO, in what form, and what gets escalated versus resolved below.</li> <li><strong>Executive communications. </strong>Board and all-hands material and internal updates for the Product/Eng org, grounded in its real state.</li> <li><strong>People partnership.</strong> With the People CoE, run headcount planning, org design, and leveling/comp inside Product/Eng — applying central frameworks, owning the org's read on where it's over- or under-built, and serving as the CTO's single counterpart to the People team.</li> <li><strong>Finance partnership. </strong>Own the Product/Eng budget and spend against the plan Finance sets — track burn, flag variance, model headcount and vendor trade-offs, and act as the CTO's counterpart to FP&A. Own the success metrics in partnership with FP&A to ensure tight alignment on business levers to drive growth and deployment of capital.</li> </ul> <p><strong>You Have</strong></p> <ul> <li>~10 years in product management, technical program or portfolio management, strategy, business operations, or a role with genuine operational ownership — not coordination.</li> <li>A record of holding multiple parallel workstreams, competing stakeholders, and ambiguous ownership, and keeping all of it moving.</li> <li>Experience building or running a PMO or program portfolio. You’ve designed intake, prioritization, and delivery-tracking processes that teams use rather than work around.</li> <li>Experience managing and growing a team, ideally program or project managers. You’ve hired, coached, and given hard feedback, and built a function others want to join.</li> <li>Enough technical fluency to hold a real conversation with a platform engineer — APIs, infrastructure, deployment, architecture at a conceptual level — and to read a design doc and push on it. Not a coder.</li> <li>Financial and operational fluency: managing a budget, speaking to variance, tackling headcount and spend trade-offs.</li> <li>Comfort with org design and workforce planning as a partner to a People function — fluent enough to be a real thought partner, without running it.</li> <li>Influence beyond your own team: moving engineers, PMs, and GTM leads through trust, framing, and timing, not by invoking the CTO's name.</li> <li>Extreme organizational precision — systems legible to others, clean first drafts, async updates that need minimal editing.</li> <li>Nice-to-have: experience delivering programs under government contracts (milestones, deliverables, compliance reporting.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Nice to have, but not required</strong></p> <ul> <li>Experience building production systems with LLMs, agents, evals, or retrieval.</li> &