Field CTO

PhysicsX•New York, NY

10d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Deployment Engineering team is responsible for deploying the PhysicsX platform into customer-owned infrastructure. This is a technically complex, high-stakes process: working with customer IT teams to map their environment, navigating security and compliance requirements, standing up the infrastructure needed to run our Kubernetes-based Platform, and seeing the deployment through to success. You'll be accountable for the end-to-end success of these deployments. As Field CTO, you are the Deployment Engineering leader for your region — the person who owns both the relationships and the results. You'll be the primary point of contact for the CIOs and CTOs of our most strategic accounts, building the kind of trusted technical partnership that turns a deployment into a long-term relationship. At the same time, you'll lead and grow the deployment team for your region, setting the standard for how we deliver and scaling the team to match our ambitions. This is a hybrid role. You're expected to lead at the executive level and roll up your sleeves when the situation calls for it. The best candidate will be someone who has built and shipped complex infrastructure systems, and who can translate that experience into credibility and clarity when sitting across the table from a customer's engineering leadership.

Requirements

Technical depth with executive presence. You have a strong engineering background — in infrastructure, platform, or systems engineering — and the communication skills to make complex topics land clearly with a CIO or CTO.
Customer-first instinct. You build trust with customers by being straight with them: on timelines, on constraints, on what's possible. You understand that a successful deployment is only valuable if the customer feels confident throughout the process, and you hold yourself accountable for that experience.
Leadership that scales teams. You've hired and developed technical people and have a track record of building teams that execute at speed. You set high standards, coach others to meet them, and create the environment for your deployment engineers to do their best work.
Commercial awareness. You understand the relationship between technical delivery and commercial outcomes. You'll work closely with delivery teams to make sure the deployment programme aligns with what customers have committed to, and you're not afraid to flag when it doesn't.
Comfort in complex, regulated environments. Our customers operate in sectors where security, compliance, and infrastructure governance are non-negotiable. You've navigated these environments before — whether working with on-premise infrastructure, air-gapped environments, or enterprise IT organisations with lengthy approval processes.
A track record of leading technical teams delivering complex infrastructure or platform deployments into enterprise environments
Strong experience with Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, Open Stack, RHOS) — enough to lead technical conversations with your team and with customer engineering leadership. You will need to be accountable for the technical quality of the team’s output.
Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tooling (Crossplane, Terraform, Helm) and the OCI ecosystem
Experience navigating enterprise IT organisations: security reviews, procurement processes, and stakeholder management across technical and non-technical audiences
Proven ability to build relationships with senior technical executives (CTO, CIO, VP Engineering) at large organisations
Experience hiring and growing technical teams
Excellent communication skills — written, verbal, and in the room
Willingness to travel to customer sites within your region, and occasionally internationally, for an average of 3–4 weeks per quarter
Experience in regulated or high-security environments is a must

Nice To Haves

Experience with on-prem / HPC type “scientific” environments is a nice to have

Responsibilities

Lead technical conversations with customer CIOs and CTOs — scoping deployments, resolving escalations, and building the trust that keeps strategic relationships strong.
Represent PhysicsX as the senior technical voice in your region.
Own the deployment programme across your accounts.
Understand the status of every active deployment, identifying blockers before they become problems, and being the person your team and your customers can rely on when things get complicated.
Work closely with delivery leads in New York and elsewhere to make sure commercial commitments and deployment realities are in sync.
Surface risks early.
Provide the ground-level input that shapes how we scope and sell deployments.
Recruit, onboard, and develop deployment engineers in your region.
Define what good looks like, create the processes that make the team repeatable at scale, and build a culture of technical rigour and customer accountability.
When a deployment is particularly complex — a novel infrastructure environment, a difficult security review, a customer escalation that needs senior technical judgement — you get involved directly.
Shape how PhysicsX delivers platform version upgrades in the field — bringing the customer-facing context, operational insight, and cross-team coordination needed to ensure upgrades land reliably and on a cadence customers can plan around.