Chief Technology Officer - Fastmarkets

JOB DESCRIPTION

Fastmarkets is Euromoney’s commodities price reporting, information and events business. It is growing rapidly. Its business serves the global metals, minerals, forest-products and agriculture markets. The business also runs events for each of its three market verticals. Historically a news-led subscription business, the strategy has been to evolve the operation into a pricing-led data business.

We launched Fastmarkets as the business’s new brand in the summer of 2018. Fastmarkets encompasses the brands of Metal Bulletin, American Metal Market, RISI, FOEX, Random Lengths and AgriCensus. These storied brands, the oldest dating back to 1874, are leading names in commodity pricing in the global metals, mining, forest product and agriculture markets.

We are seeking an experienced Chief Technical Officer (CTO) to join us in our mission to continue the development and innovation program centred around a world class digital platform to drive growth across the business, with a focus on ultimately accelerating our strategy.

Considerable investment has been made developing a world class CRM sales and marketing stack built around Salesforce.

The Technology team at Fastmarkets includes around 70 people predominantly based in the UK and the US, as well as an offshore team based in Russia.

JOB PURPOSE

To provide leadership, owning and developing a compelling Fastmarkets technology vision and strategy.

Leading the development and delivery of our world class Fastmarkets platform, ensuring that the architecture is scalable, robust, secure and delivers the best possible experience for our customers. Ensuring that best-fit technology is leveraged to enable the business by achieving our business objectives.

Leading and developing our product engineering team, helping them to continue to innovate and deliver best in class product technology.

Working with the Group CIO (internal technology focus) and other central functions to build out an advanced business IT capability encompassing CRM, Marketing Automation and ERP to ensure the business have the platforms required to allow them to drive revenue growth and surface the business insights that they require.

PRINCIPAL ACCOUNTABILITIES

The CTO is accountable for:

Technology strategy and architecture

• Developing the business’s technology strategy and roadmaps that will enable the business to achieve its objectives
• Owning and developing the technology architecture for Fastmarkets
• Delivering against the technology roadmaps, building and maintaining the confidence and trust of key stakeholders including the CEO, C-suite executives
• To provide overall technology leadership and business engagement as a member of the Fastmarkets Executive Team
• Ensure that platforms are architected to be resilient, flexible, scalable and secure in order to meet the requirements of our customers today and in the future as the business grows

Product development and maintenance

• Work with the Product management team to formulate roadmaps, prioritising and resolving cross dependencies as necessary
• Implementing a Martech stack and Event management platform
• To drive a culture of innovation, ensuring that new technologies are adopted at the right point in their maturity cycle and deliver a competitive advantage
• Accountable to the business for technology service levels and proactive resolution of both internal and external customer operations
• Ensuring stability, performance and security of products in line with and advancing Group standards

Management, budget responsibility and operations

• Leadership of a global technology team of c.70 people (Software Engineers, Technical Architects, Software Testers, Data Engineers, Business Analysts, UX Engineers and Project/Program Manager) distributed across our London and New York offices as well as offshore
• Build a diverse, high-performing, well-motivated team including the attraction, retention, coaching, development and management of talent
• Providing strategic direction and clarity of purpose to the team while identifying and nurturing any missing capabilities and competencies required
• Build strong and effective relationships with key stakeholders throughout the organisation.
• Managing a significant annual technology budget
• Managing Fastmarkets technology governance, risk, and compliance

M&A

• Technology due diligence for potential business acquisitions working with the CEO and Head of Strategy
• Technical integration of acquisitions

KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE AND SKILLS

Candidate Experience:

Successful track record as a CTO with 10+ years of leadership experience in these areas

• Extensive experience as a hands-on engineer and architect with a proven track-record of delivering complex, high volume data-centric platforms (financial services or trading)
• Strong knowledge and experience of Cloud-native technologies (preferably Microsoft Azure), .NET development, Azure Service Fabric, PaaS, Microservices architecture
• Saas based product development and knowledge
• A strong yet grounded leadership style with a hands-on approach, naturally able to command respect
• Significant experience in leading and developing cross discipline geographically dispersed technology teams in a fast-paced data-centric digital business
• Possess a good mix of strategic and hands-on practical technical knowledge with an awareness of the latest technical enablers and trends
• An ability to think laterally in the search for new and optimum technology solutions to business challenges
• Commercial skills necessary for vendor / supplier negotiations
• A strong interest and understanding of the commodities or similar market place including the emerging trends and technologies of a real time trading environment
• Demonstrable experience of having built, coached and developed high-performing technical teams
• Commercially minded, with a strong appreciation of delivering business value
• Possess strong interpersonal skills and relationship management competencies, in addition to excellent influencing, negotiating and communication skills

Candidate Attributes:

• Experienced and highly technical individual, who continues to maintain his/her technical skills
• Calm and collected thinker, able to solve complex business challenges
• Able to articulate technology strategy in such a way as to engage business stakeholders
• Able to rapidly build trust and respect by delivering on commitments to stakeholders
• Genuinely passionate about technology and emerging trends, including AI & Data Science
• Able to build ground-up a high-performing and motivated technology team
• A fast learner when called for, but also comfortable asking for support
• Able to establish respected and meaningful relationships with C-suite executives
• An excellent communicator and motivator with strong interpersonal, presentation, negotiation and organizational skills
• An expert in their field who sets high standards for himself/herself and others
• A personal desire and energy to succeed

Technical environment

• Programming languages / run-times: .NET Core, HTML5, Javascript/Type Script, C++, Terraform
• Platform: Azure (cloud-native), PaaS services
• APIs: ASP.Net RESTful services, WebSockets
• Database: SQL and No-SQL
• Messaging: Durable and non-durable pub/sub, SnapLogic
• Product types: SaaS, API, Web properties, Add-ins, etc
• Design patterns, SOLID design principles
• Version Control software: GIT
• CI/CD: Team City, Octopus, Infrastructure as code, custom technologies
• Business IT: Salesforce, Marketo, NetSuite
• Service Management: ServiceNow
• Corporate Applications: M365

EDUCATION

Appropriate academic and professional qualifications to support her/his application