Co-Founder & CTO
Few job opportunities offer you the chance to save lives and reduce trauma for thousands of civilians. This is one of them: Hala Systems.
Hala Systems, Inc. is an early-stage startup focused on technology-driven solutions to crisis- and conflict related problems. We are seeking a candidate to become a key member of the executive team. This opportunity requires relevant experience, as well as a keen desire to play an instrumental role in the growth of a company that is trying to change the nature of civilian defense during warfare, crisis management, and disaster response.
The CTO’s role is to assure the successful execution of the company’s mission through research, development, deployment, and iteration of the company’s technology assets. This opportunity offers founder-grade equity.
NB: Our organization is operating discreetly, and thus the information provided herein is limited. The project will be discussed in greater detail with top candidates during interviews.
Key Responsibilities
Reporting to the CEO, the CTO will lead all technology and data efforts. Responsibilities include:
• Identify opportunities and risks for delivering the company’s services, including identification of competitive services, opportunities for innovation, and assessment of marketplace obstacles and technical hurdles to success
• Identify technology trends and evolving social behavior in the target environment that may support or impede the success of the business
• Identify, evaluate and source appropriate tools and technology for delivering the company’s services
• Lead strategic planning to achieve business goals by identifying and prioritizing research and development initiatives and setting timetables for the evaluation, development, and deployment of all technology-based services
• Participate as a member of the senior management team in establishing governance processes of direction and control to ensure that objectives are achieved, risks are managed appropriately and the organization’s resources are used responsibly, particularly in the areas of hardware/software research and development
• Assess and recommend technologies that support company organizational needs
• Direct development and execution of a disaster recovery and business continuity plan
• Communicate the company’s technology strategy to investors, management, staff, partners, customers,and stakeholders
• Select and manage company staff or outsourced vendors who will implement engineering
• Establish and supervise the software development process
• Monitor application performance and review any application failures in staging or production
• Ensure that technology standards and best practices are maintained across the organization
• Share knowledge, mentor, and educate the organization’s investors, management, staff, partners, customers, and stakeholders with regard to the company’s technological vision, opportunities, and challenges
• Supervise recruitment, training, retention, and organization of all engineering staff
• Establish standards of performance and monitor conformance for staff and partners
• Contribute to open source software development, standardization of technologies, and evolution of best practices by collaborating with peers outside the company, releasing code, presenting at conferences, and
writing for publication
• Develop best practices for instrumentation and experimentation and communicate those to engineering teams
Qualifications & Personal Characteristics
• Proven leadership ability and high-impact entrepreneurship / intrapreneurship experience
• Track record of extraordinary achievement and commitment to positive social change
• History of creativity and initiative beyond conventional high performance
• Values-driven, trustworthy and honest
• Ph.D. in a relevant technical field or commensurate experience in a relevant role.
− Highest priority expertise includes: data science, machine learning, stochastic systems, artificial neural networks, natural language processing, social & information network analysis
− Other very relevant fields: computer vision for mobile applications, sensor & communication networks, mechanical & electrical engineering, computational geometry & geometric modeling, cryptography &
information security
• Ability to set and manage priorities judiciously
• Experience managing technical and product development teams
• Excellent written and oral communication skills
• Exceptionally self-motivated and driven
• Ability to articulate ideas to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Ability to thrive in a challenging environment, managing ambiguity and volatility with alacrity
• Extensive experience solving analytical problems using quantitative approaches
• Comfort manipulating and analyzing complex, high-volume, high-dimensionality data from a multitude of sources
• A strong passion for empirical research and for answering hard questions with data
• A flexible analytic approach that allows for results at varying levels of precision
• Fluency with at least one relevant programming language
• Strong familiarity with relational databases and SQL
• Expert knowledge of an analysis tool such as R, Matlab, or SAS
• Experience working with large data sets; experience working with distributed computing tools a plus (Map/Reduce, Hadoop, Hive, etc.)
• Experience working on the ground in emerging markets and/or in crisis situations preferred
• A good sense of humor
Applying
• If you are eager to use your extraordinary technical expertise to effect positive social change and to wake up enthusiastic about your work every day, please send your CV to:
John Jaeger: — john@halasystems.com.
Please include the tag “[CTO Position]” in the subject of the email.
• Interviews and requests for references will follow
• Timeframe is ASAP