Field CTO - Performance (e-commerce)

Fastly • San Francisco, CA

10h • Hybrid

About The Position

Fastly helps people stay better connected with the things they love. Fastly’s edge cloud platform enables customers to create great digital experiences quickly, securely, and reliably by processing, serving, and securing our customers’ applications as close to their end-users as possible — at the edge of the Internet. The platform is designed to take advantage of the modern internet, to be programmable, and to support agile software development. Fastly’s customers include many of the world’s most prominent companies, including GitHub, Yelp, Paramount, and JetBlue.
We're building a more trustworthy Internet. Come join us.
Help Fastly’s e-commerce and retail customers design, implement, and optimize solutions that drive measurable business impact and help close big deals. As a key member of the go-to-market team, you’ll partner closely with Account Executives, Solution Engineers, and Customer Success to identify technical opportunities, prove the value of Fastly’s platform, and guide customers through critical buying decisions.
Your work will directly influence major enterprise deals by providing technical strategy, architectural credibility, and proof through hands-on demos, prototypes, and performance outcomes.

Requirements

• 15+ years of experience in web performance engineering, systems architecture, or frontend/backend optimization, with hands-on experience on large-scale, high-traffic ecommerce websites or marketplaces.
• Deep expertise in web performance metrics (Core Web Vitals, TTFB, rendering paths) and diagnostic tooling.
• Expertise in CDN configurations, VCL or edge compute logic, dynamic and static caching strategies, cache invalidation, and offloading. Familiarity with serverless and edge compute architectures is highly desired.
• Strong background in caching strategies, image delivery, modern protocols (HTTP/2, HTTP/3), and TLS optimization.
• Proven ability to connect technical improvements to business KPIs (conversion, revenue, retention).
• Consulting mindset with excellent communication and storytelling skills for both technical and executive audiences
• You are a deep technical expert with a strategic business mindset. You don't just solve performance problems; you connect technical optimizations directly to business outcomes like conversion, retention, and revenue.
• You are a seasoned consultant and mentor within the e-commerce and Retail industry. You excel at communicating complex technical concepts to diverse stakeholders and have a proven ability to guide both customer and internal engineering teams toward best practices.
• You are a systems thinker who sees the whole picture. You understand that modern e-commerce performance is a multi-factor problem, encompassing everything from frontend rendering and third-party scripts to CDN configurations and backend infrastructure.
• You are driven by data and measurement. You have a hands-on approach to diagnostics, using tools like RUM and synthetics to identify bottlenecks and prove the impact of your work.
• You are a technology leader and innovator. You are passionate about sharing your knowledge by speaking at conferences, writing, organizing meetups, and contributing to industry-wide projects.

Nice To Haves

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Security, or a related field.

Responsibilities

• Partner in Pre-Sales and Deal Acceleration
• Collaborate with Account Executives to understand customer business drivers, technical challenges, and success criteria.
• Define and deliver technical solutions that demonstrate Fastly’s unique capabilities, helping customers visualize the “art of the possible.”
• Build confidence in Fastly’s platform by leading architectural discussions, running proof-of-concepts, and addressing objections that could slow or block deal progression.
• Quantify the impact of Fastly’s solutions using data and performance insights to show clear ROI and business value in proposals and executive meetings.
• Contribute to RFPs and technical responses that directly support sales opportunities.
• Architect and Implement Performance Solutions
• Design and deliver end-to-end web performance improvements using Fastly’s CDN, Compute@Edge, advanced caching, image optimization, and modern web protocols.
• Assess customer architectures with RUM/synthetic tooling, identifying bottlenecks and defining a data-driven improvement plan.
• Lead proof-of-concepts and migrations of critical workloads onto the Fastly platform.
• Align Performance with e-commerce & Business Strategy
• Act as a consultant to translate technical performance metrics into tangible business outcomes, demonstrating how faster page loads or optimized checkout flows directly impact conversion rates, cart abandonment, and customer lifetime value.
• Collaborate with customer engineering, product, and leadership teams to ensure performance is a key consideration throughout the development lifecycle and is aligned with their commercial objectives.
• Solve performance challenges unique to high-traffic ecommerce and marketplace environments, such as large product catalogs, third-party payment provider delays, dynamic content variability, and the need for personalized experiences at scale.
• Lead, Mentor, and Innovate with an Edge-First Mindset
• Provide expert guidance and mentorship to customer engineering teams on web performance best practices, helping them build a culture where performance is a shared responsibility.
• Lead proof-of-concepts and migrations of critical functionality to the Fastly platform, such as implementing new caching strategies or moving logic to the edge with Compute@Edge to enhance speed and resilience.
• Stay current with the evolution of the web platform—including browsers, protocols, and metrics like Core Web Vitals—and feed that knowledge back into Fastly's product roadmap.
• Thought Leadership and Community Engagement
• Act as a public voice and thought leader in the web performance and ecommerce communities.
• Speak at industry-related conferences, share expertise through blog posts, and participate in community forums to build both your personal brand and Fastly's reputation as a leader in the field.
• Organize or participate in community events like meetups to foster a culture of knowledge-sharing and continuous learning.
• Measure, Monitor, and Drive Continuous Improvement
• Define and monitor performance budgets and SLAs to ensure a consistently fast experience for all users.
• Utilize a suite of observability tools (e.g., Fastly analytics, WebPageTest, Lighthouse, RUM solutions) to measure, report, and visualize performance, using data to guide all optimization efforts.
• Contribute to troubleshooting performance-related incidents and participate in post-mortems to build more resilient, antifragile systems for our customers.

Benefits

• We offer a comprehensive benefits package including medical, dental, and vision insurance. Family planning, mental health support along with Employee Assistance Program, Insurance (Life, Disability, and Accident), a Flexible Vacation policy and up to 18 days of accrued paid sick leave are there to help support our employees. We also offer 401(k) (including company match) and an Employee Stock Purchase Program. For 2026, we offer 10 paid local holidays, 11 paid company wellness days.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level