Co-CTO

CO-CTO & TECHNICAL CO-FOUNDER

Help Build, Lead and Scale Tono – a Next-Generation B2B SaaS Platform Remote-first | Flexible Commitment | Approximately 15–20 Hours per Week | Equity Participation WOULD YOU LIKE TO HELP BUILD A EUROPEAN SAAS BUSINESS? We are looking for an experienced, entrepreneurial technology leader to join the founding team behind Tono as Co-CTO and Technical Co-Founder. We have already developed a comprehensive B2B SaaS platform using TypeScript, Next.js and Convex, and we are approaching an important new phase: product refinement, commercial launch, customer implementations and international expansion. Our immediate priority is to strengthen the coordination, prioritisation and quality assurance of our development activities. We are therefore looking for someone who can bring structure and momentum to an ambitious software project, translate business priorities into clear technical deliverables, and ensure that development work is completed, tested and ready for release. You should have a strong software engineering background, but your greatest contribution will be your ability to combine technical expertise with practical leadership, sound judgement and consistent execution. This is much more than a conventional development position. You will work closely with our existing CTO, Chief Product Officer and CEO, contribute to customer-facing activities and become an active member of the team shaping Tono's future. You will be joining a business with an established software platform, a committed founding team, a clear product strategy and an experienced advisory board.

ABOUT TONO

Tono is a Danish technology company developing an External Workforce Governance Platform for organisations that engage external consultants, freelancers and professional services providers. In many larger organisations, external workforce management remains fragmented across different systems, spreadsheets, emails and manual processes. This makes it difficult to maintain a consolidated view of who is working for the business, what they are delivering, how much they cost and whether contractual and compliance requirements are being met. Tono has been designed to address this challenge. Our platform connects three key participants within one integrated environment:

• Enterprise clients engaging external expertise.
• Consulting firms and staffing suppliers providing specialist resources.
• Individual consultants and freelancers delivering the work.

The platform supports processes associated with sourcing, skills matching, contracting, approvals, assignment management, time recording, invoicing, financial visibility and compliance. A fundamental principle behind Tono is that all three participants work with relevant shared information relating to the same engagement, rather than maintaining separate and disconnected processes. Tono also incorporates functionality for assessing and documenting compliance risks, including worker classification and cross-border engagement considerations. Artificial intelligence supports selected workflows, including skills profiling, drafting requirements and candidate matching, while retaining appropriate human oversight. Our ambition is to make external workforce management more connected, transparent and efficient for everyone involved. We are initially focused on the Nordic market, with the longer-term ambition of building a competitive European software business. Adapt. Align. Accelerate. THE OPPORTUNITY: CO-CTO AND MEMBER OF THE FOUNDING TEAM As Co-CTO, you will become a key technology and business partner to our existing CTO, Chief Product Officer and CEO. Your principal responsibility will be to help turn product ambitions, business requirements and development priorities into well-coordinated, high-quality software releases. We have a substantial platform and an ambitious development roadmap. What we need most is someone who can help ensure that the right activities receive attention, development efforts are coordinated effectively, and completed functionality meets the expected quality standards. You will help establish a clear operational rhythm across development, product management and quality assurance. This includes translating requirements into actionable development tasks, maintaining a prioritised backlog, following up on progress, identifying dependencies and ensuring that completed functionality is properly tested before release. You must be technically capable of understanding, reviewing and contributing to the codebase. However, this is not primarily a role focused on producing the largest volume of code. It is about technical ownership, delivery discipline, quality and the ability to make a small team highly effective. Importantly, you will complement our existing CTO, not replace them. We want to bring together complementary technical expertise within a collaborative founding team. The precise responsibilities and decision-making authority will be agreed upon together.

YOUR KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

DEVELOPMENT COORDINATION & TECHNICAL PROJECT LEADERSHIP Your first priority will be to create structure, clarity and momentum in the development process. You will:

• Coordinate development activities across the technical and product teams.
• Translate product requirements and strategic priorities into clearly defined, actionable development tasks.
• Maintain a structured and prioritised development backlog.
• Establish clear milestones, responsibilities and delivery expectations.
• Follow up on progress, dependencies and outstanding decisions.
• Identify blockers early and help resolve them before they affect delivery.
• Ensure that development activities remain aligned with business objectives and commercial priorities.
• Provide the founding team with clear, concise progress updates and visibility of upcoming deliverables.

You should be comfortable taking ownership of technical delivery without introducing unnecessary bureaucracy. We value practical coordination, clear communication and accountability over complicated project management frameworks.

PRODUCT PRIORITISATION & ROADMAP EXECUTION

Working closely with the CTO and Chief Product Officer, you will help determine what should be developed, improved or completed next. This includes:

• Evaluating technical requirements against business value, complexity and dependencies.
• Helping distinguish critical functionality from improvements that can reasonably wait.
• Breaking larger initiatives into manageable development activities.
• Ensuring that product decisions are translated into realistic delivery plans.
• Balancing new feature development with bug fixing, technical debt, performance and stability.
• Supporting the technical evaluation of customer requirements and potential integrations.
• Maintaining alignment between the product roadmap and actual development capacity.

A key part of your contribution will be helping the team focus on the right priorities rather than simply increasing the number of activities in progress.

QUALITY ASSURANCE, TESTING & RELEASE READINESS

Quality assurance will be one of your most important responsibilities. As Tono prepares for enterprise customers, we need a consistent and structured approach to ensuring that functionality works as intended across the platform. You will help establish and maintain practical QA processes covering:

• Clear acceptance criteria for development tasks.
• Functional testing of new and modified features.
• End-to-end testing across the enterprise client, consulting firm and consultant interfaces.
• Regression testing to identify unintended consequences of changes.
• Structured bug reporting, prioritisation and resolution.
• Code review and technical quality standards.
• Appropriate automated testing.
• Verification of critical workflows and business rules.
• Release readiness assessments.
• Documentation of relevant test results and outstanding issues.

Particular attention will be required for functionality involving financial data, approvals, contracts, permissions, invoicing and compliance-related workflows. You will work with the team to determine which tests should be automated and where manual validation remains necessary. The objective is not to create a large QA department or a complex testing bureaucracy. It is to establish a reliable, repeatable process that gives us confidence in the software we release.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING & ARCHITECTURE

Tono's existing platform is built using:

• TypeScript
• Next.js
• Convex

You will work closely with our CTO on the continued development and technical evolution of this architecture. You should be comfortable reviewing code, understanding the existing application structure, evaluating technical solutions and contributing hands-on when appropriate. Your responsibilities may include:

• Reviewing implementation approaches and architecture decisions.
• Contributing to technically demanding development activities.
• Supporting code quality, maintainability and performance.
• Helping identify and manage technical debt.
• Evaluating integrations and API requirements.
• Supporting deployment processes and development tooling.
• Helping ensure that the platform remains robust and scalable as the product evolves.

We are looking for someone who understands that strong technical leadership requires both architectural perspective and practical engineering experience.

PRE-SALES & CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

As part of the founding team, you will also have the opportunity to participate in commercial activities. You may join customer meetings, product demonstrations and technical workshops where your expertise can help explain the platform and build confidence in our approach. This may involve:

• Explaining Tono's technical architecture and application capabilities.
• Discussing integration possibilities with prospective customers.
• Assessing technical requirements raised during sales discussions.
• Contributing to security and technical due diligence.
• Helping determine the feasibility and effort involved in customer-specific requirements.
• Supporting the translation of customer feedback into product priorities.

You should be comfortable communicating with both technical specialists and business decision-makers. You do not need to be a salesperson. However, you should enjoy helping prospective customers understand how technology can solve their business challenges.

STRATEGIC COLLABORATION & FUTURE SCALING

As Co-CTO, you will contribute to the broader development of Tono as a business. This includes participating in discussions about:

• Product strategy.
• Technology choices.
• Development priorities.
• Commercial requirements.
• Customer feedback.
• Team structure.
• Development capacity.
• Future recruitment.
• Engineering processes and tooling.
• International scalability.

As the company grows, you will help establish the working practices and organisational foundations needed to support a larger development team.

ABOUT YOU

You have a strong technical background and the ability to lead, coordinate, and improve software development activities. Your previous experience may include roles such as:

• Technical Lead
• Engineering Manager
• Head of Engineering
• Software Architect
• Technical Delivery Lead
• Senior Full-Stack Engineer
• CTO or Technical Co-Founder

We are particularly interested in candidates who have combined hands-on development with technical coordination, product delivery or engineering leadership.

YOUR TECHNICAL BACKGROUND

You have solid experience developing and maintaining modern web applications, preferably B2B SaaS platforms. Ideally, you bring:

• Strong practical experience with TypeScript.
• Experience developing production applications using Next.js and React.
• Knowledge of Convex, or the ability to become productive quickly within its architecture.
• A good understanding of full-stack application development.
• Experience with data modelling, backend logic, APIs and integrations.
• Familiarity with authentication, authorisation and application security.
• Experience with automated testing, debugging and code reviews.
• Understanding of CI/CD, deployment workflows and release management.
• Experience maintaining software quality in a continuously evolving codebase.

Experience with Convex is an advantage, but strong TypeScript and Next.js expertise, together with a proven ability to work across modern full-stack architectures, is more important than having used every technology in our stack. Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools, such as Cursor, is also relevant, as these technologies already form part of our development approach.

YOUR LEADERSHIP & DELIVERY EXPERIENCE

Technical competence alone is not enough for this role. We are looking for someone who has demonstrated an ability to:

• Coordinate technical activities across people and workstreams.
• Prioritise effectively when resources are limited.
• Translate loosely defined requirements into manageable development tasks.
• Establish clear acceptance criteria and delivery expectations.
• Organise and follow up on testing activities.
• Identify quality issues before they reach users.
• Communicate development progress clearly.
• Make pragmatic decisions when priorities compete.
• Balance delivery speed with technical quality.

You do not need experience managing a large engineering organisation. Experience leading a small, capable development team or coordinating technically demanding projects may be equally relevant. YOUR MINDSET MATTERS AS MUCH AS YOUR TECHNICAL EXPERTISE We are looking for someone who brings structure without creating bureaucracy. You are organised, pragmatic and comfortable taking responsibility for delivery. You understand the importance of making clear decisions, following up on commitments and ensuring that work is completed to an agreed standard. You enjoy collaborating with developers, product specialists and business stakeholders, and you know how to translate between their different perspectives. You are comfortable challenging assumptions and suggesting improvements, but you also recognise when a practical solution is better than a theoretically perfect one. You can work independently, yet communicate proactively and consistently. You appreciate the realities of building a startup: priorities change, resources are limited, and not every process has been fully established. Rather than seeing this as a problem, you see an opportunity to help create the right structure. Above all, you want to make a meaningful contribution to both the product and the company behind it.

HOW WE WORK

Tono currently operates as a remote-first team. We work from different locations and place considerable emphasis on flexibility, trust, open communication and individual accountability. We have two scheduled online stand-up meetings each week, where we coordinate activities, review progress, discuss challenges and agree priorities. As Co-CTO, you will play an important role in helping make these meetings effective and ensuring that decisions and actions are followed through. Additional online meetings take place whenever technical or commercial matters require closer collaboration. We do not believe that good project management requires constant meetings. We believe in clear priorities, transparent progress, well-defined responsibilities and an effective balance between coordination and focused work. We expect you to be engaged, accessible and proactive in your communication. In return, we offer considerable flexibility regarding where and when you work. We envisage an initial commitment of approximately 15–20 hours per week. This makes it possible to maintain other professional commitments, provided that availability, engagement and potential conflicts of interest can be managed appropriately. We see this as a long-term partnership rather than a short-term consultancy assignment.

MORE THAN A TECHNOLOGY ROLE

One of the most interesting aspects of this opportunity is the breadth of responsibility involved. You will not simply help us develop more functionality. You will help us become better at delivering software. That means helping establish the right answers to questions such as: How do we ensure that the development team is always working on the highest-priority activities? How do we turn product ideas and business requirements into clear, manageable development tasks? How do we coordinate work effectively across a small, distributed team? How do we ensure that new functionality is tested properly and that existing functionality continues to work after changes? How do we maintain development momentum without compromising quality or creating unnecessary process overhead? And how do we prepare our development organisation for the expectations of enterprise customers and future growth? As Co-CTO, you will have a meaningful role in shaping these practices and making them part of how Tono operates.

WHAT WE OFFER

This is not a conventional full-time employment opportunity. It is an opportunity to join an existing startup as Co-CTO and Technical Co-Founder, with meaningful influence over product development, engineering practices, technical strategy and the company's future direction. We offer a flexible, long-term commitment with the opportunity for equity participation. The specific ownership structure and commercial terms will be agreed individually. You will be working with:

• An established B2B SaaS platform.
• A modern TypeScript, Next.js and Convex technology stack.
• A founding team with complementary technical, product and commercial experience.
• An experienced advisory board.
• A company preparing for commercial launch and Nordic market expansion.
• The opportunity to help shape both technology delivery and the future engineering organisation.

We have an ambitious vision, but we also recognise that building a successful technology company requires focus, disciplined execution and consistent software quality. That's why we are looking for an additional senior technical leader.

INTERESTED IN AN INITIAL CONVERSATION?

If you are an experienced Technical Lead, Engineering Manager, Software Architect or senior software engineer who enjoys combining technology with coordination, delivery and quality assurance, we would welcome a conversation. You do not need to have decided on a startup career, nor do you need to leave your current position simply to explore the opportunity. What matters most is your technical expertise, structured approach, entrepreneurial mindset and willingness to take meaningful responsibility. For an informal and confidential discussion, please contact: Tono | Governing the External Workforce Adapt. Align. Accelerate.