Chief Technology Officer

Artsy • London, New York

2d • $300,000 - $350,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Artsy and Artnet have combined to create the world’s largest online art marketplace and information platform. Together, they connect collectors, galleries, auction houses, and institutions across a global market valued at over $60 billion. Their products serve both the art world’s largest institutions and individual collectors – supporting art discovery, research and transactions. The combined company is at a pivotal moment, bringing together the broadest customer base in the online art market, uniquely valuable proprietary data, a proven team, and new velocity as a combined organization. They believe the rapid evolution of AI will reshape not just how they build their products, but how their users interact with them. They are looking for a technology leader who is excited about that future. The Chief Technology Officer will lead the combined engineering organization through a period of ambitious growth and technological transformation. This is a mandate to retool how an entire organization builds software, to mentor a talented team through that transition, and to ensure that what is being built today is designed for the world users will inhabit tomorrow. The right person is energized by hard questions about AI's impact on the platform, user interaction, and the future of engineering teams. Reporting directly to the CEO, the CTO will own the full technology function: engineering, infrastructure, and technical architecture. They will be the company’s eyes on the technology frontier, constantly scanning what’s emerging, and pressure-testing assumptions about what’s feasible. As a key member of the senior leadership team, they will surface information and opportunities to help shape company direction and make the best possible strategic decisions. The CTO will also be a mentor and teacher to the entire organization, bringing the team along in the transition to AI-augmented workflows, raising everyone’s capabilities, and creating an environment where engineers, product managers, designers, and business operators are all fluent in what’s now possible.

Requirements

• Led engineering organizations through periods of significant change: post-acquisition integration, rapid scaling, or fundamental retooling, and have the judgment that comes from having done it, not just studied it.
• Real, hands-on experience integrating AI into engineering workflows and are a strong enough technical architect to evaluate whether a solution, AI-generated or otherwise, is elegant or a mess, and explain why to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Bias toward speed. Know how to set an aggressive tempo, clear the obstacles that slow teams down, and create a culture where shipping is the default, not the exception.
• Bring a sense of urgency to the work. Do not let decisions linger, do not let projects drift, and hold yourself and your teams to a standard that's obvious to everyone around you.
• Think critically about moats and defensibility, and connect engineering investments to business outcomes. Comfortable in conversations about revenue, margin, and growth.
• Take security and infrastructure seriously, particularly as AI introduces new categories of risk across development and product surfaces.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with two-sided marketplace platforms, particularly those serving both B2B and B2C audiences.
• Familiarity with the art world, luxury goods, or cultural industries.
• Background as a technical cofounder or early-stage CTO who has built and shipped product with small, high-output teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead the adoption of AI-augmented development workflows across the engineering organization, fundamentally increasing what the team can ship and how fast they can ship it.
• Mentor engineers, product managers, designers, and business operators in new ways of working, making AI fluency a core competency across the org, not just a tooling layer for a few.
• Build on the team’s existing foundation of modern tooling, agile practices, and continuous delivery to foster a culture of continuous experimentation where the team is always testing what’s newly possible and incorporating it into how they work.
• Establish the org as an industry reference point for how modern technology teams operate at the intersection of AI and product development.
• Assess which elements of our platform represent durable competitive advantages and which are at risk of being commoditized or disrupted by AI.
• In close partnership with the CPO, develop a technical strategy for the agentic future: how our platform should work when users discover, research, and transact through AI agents and intermediaries rather than traditional interfaces.
• Identify where we are underinvested, in data, infrastructure, APIs, or capabilities, and build the roadmap to close those gaps.
• Ensure our architecture is modular and adaptable, designed to evolve quickly as both the business and the underlying technology landscape change.
• Unify two legacy technology platforms into a coherent, modern architecture that serves both brands and all customer segments.
• Make pragmatic, high-conviction decisions about what to consolidate, what to rebuild, and what to retire.
• Bring together engineers from both organizations into integrated, mission-driven teams.
• Own the company’s security and infrastructure posture as AI tooling and agentic product surfaces introduce new categories of risk and complexity.
• Maintain rigorous standards for data integrity, system resilience, and platform trust as the business scales and the technology landscape evolves.
• Be the company’s scout on the technology frontier, constantly canvassing the market for emerging capabilities and translating them into concrete opportunities the product team can act on.
• Serve as a key voice in the company’s product roadmap process, partnering with the CPO and broader senior leadership team to ensure strategic priorities are informed by the fullest possible picture of what’s technically achievable today and what will be achievable tomorrow.
• Bring a data-driven and marketplace-native understanding of the infrastructure that powers discovery, pricing, transactions, and logistics, and a point of view on how AI will reshape each of those layers.
• Make the product organization smarter by expanding the menu of options they’re choosing from, not by second-guessing their choices.

Benefits

• The opportunity to define how a combined, category-leading company builds technology at a moment when the entire discipline is being reinvented.
• A CEO who is deeply engaged with the technology strategy and wants a true thought partner, not a service provider.
• A talented, mission-driven engineering team ready to be challenged and developed.
• A strong senior leadership team across product, operations, and finance.
• Competitive compensation including meaningful equity in the combined entity.
• A home base in New York or London, with the flexibility of a hybrid model.
• Comprehensive healthcare & benefit options, including: medical, dental, parental leave, short- and long-term disability, Employee Assistance Program featuring free mental health support, 401k, commuter benefits, flexible spending accounts (FSA), health savings accounts (HSA), financial wellness support & resources, and more.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Executive
• Education Level: No Education Listed