Chief of Staff to the CTO

The Opportunity at Altana

This role is a force multiplier for the CTO and the Product, Engineering, and Implementation leadership team. You operate as an extension of the CTO, absorbing context across every workstream, making real prioritization calls, wielding real authority, and running the operating system of a technical org that ships to both commercial and government customers around the world. 

Beyond execution, you hold the business of the Product/Eng org: its operating cadence, its budget, and its people planning, in partnership with Finance and the People team. You also build and lead the org’s Program Management Office: a team of technical program managers who run the portfolio of cross-functional programs and customer deliveries.

This is a position of operational ownership and trusted judgment; ensuring the technical functions are aligned with Altana’s business strategy and corporate governance. Where the role touches comp, leveling, org design, and budget, you apply the frameworks the People CoE and Finance own. You are the CTO's embedded counterpart to those functions, not a parallel authority.

You Will

In this role, you will own:

• Strategic projects. Lead or staff high-priority critical organizational initiatives identified by EPD leadership. 
• Operating cadence. Staff meetings, roadmap planning and portfolio reviews, metrics reviews, and leadership offsites — set agendas, drive follow-through, document and distribute decisions.
• PMO leadership. Build and lead a team of technical program managers. Hire, develop, and set the bar for the function, and decide where TPMs are embedded versus centrally deployed.
• Portfolio and delivery. Own the portfolio view of in-flight programs and customer deliveries, intake and prioritization, and delivery standards (planning, status, risk and dependency tracking, launch readiness, government contract reporting), plus the tooling that makes delivery health visible.
• Cross-functional integration. Across the various sub-teams within Product, Engineering, Implementation and our public and private sector delivery motions — surface where priorities collide and force resolution.  
• Decision and information flow. What reaches the CTO, in what form, and what gets escalated versus resolved below.
• Executive communications. Board and all-hands material and internal updates for the Product/Eng org, grounded in its real state.
• People partnership. With the People CoE, run headcount planning, org design, and leveling/comp inside Product/Eng — applying central frameworks, owning the org's read on where it's over- or under-built, and serving as the CTO's single counterpart to the People team.
• Finance partnership. Own the Product/Eng budget and spend against the plan Finance sets — track burn, flag variance, model headcount and vendor trade-offs, and act as the CTO's counterpart to FP&A. Own the success metrics in partnership with FP&A to ensure tight alignment on business levers to drive growth and deployment of capital.

You Have

• ~10 years in product management, technical program or portfolio management, strategy, business operations, or a role with genuine operational ownership — not coordination.
• A record of holding multiple parallel workstreams, competing stakeholders, and ambiguous ownership, and keeping all of it moving.
• Experience building or running a PMO or program portfolio. You’ve designed intake, prioritization, and delivery-tracking processes that teams use rather than work around.
• Experience managing and growing a team, ideally program or project managers. You’ve hired, coached, and given hard feedback, and built a function others want to join.
• Enough technical fluency to hold a real conversation with a platform engineer — APIs, infrastructure, deployment, architecture at a conceptual level — and to read a design doc and push on it. Not a coder.
• Financial and operational fluency: managing a budget, speaking to variance, tackling headcount and spend trade-offs.
• Comfort with org design and workforce planning as a partner to a People function — fluent enough to be a real thought partner, without running it.
• Influence beyond your own team: moving engineers, PMs, and GTM leads through trust, framing, and timing, not by invoking the CTO's name.
• Extreme organizational precision — systems legible to others, clean first drafts, async updates that need minimal editing.
• Nice-to-have: experience delivering programs under government contracts (milestones, deliverables, compliance reporting.

Nice to have, but not required

• Experience building production systems with LLMs, agents, evals, or retrieval.
• Experience using engineering metrics such as DORA or SPACE to improve how a team works.
• Background in trade, supply chain, compliance, or working with government customers.

This role is based in Brooklyn, NY, USA with hybrid work flexibility and candidates must be within commuting distance from our Williamsburg, Brooklyn officeUS Salary and Benefits

$235,000-$285,000

The salary range, to the extent specified for this role, is a good faith statement of the minimum and maximum levels of the annual based salary for the position.  The base salary offered to a successful candidate will depend on a wide range of compensation factors, including, but not limited to, work experience, education and/or training, critical skills, and/or business considerations. Competitive equity grants are included in the majority of full time offers; and are considered part of Altana's total compensation package. Altana also offers either a discretionary bonus or a variable compensation plan depending on the role. Additionally, Altana offers top-tier benefits for full-time employees, including:

• Flexible Time Off: Altana operates with a Flexible Time Off (FTO) policy that gives you agency over your own time off so you can maximize your work-life balance.
• Parental Leave: We offer industry leading Paid Parental Leave (PPL), providing 14 weeks of leave for non-birthing, adoptive, and foster parents and up to 26 weeks of leave for birthing parents, all paid at 100% of your base salary.
• Health Benefits: We have a full suite of medical, vision, and dental benefits with generous employer contributions, designed to give you flexibility and choice for your individual health situation. Our high deductible health plan is 100% employer paid for employees and supplemented with an employer contribution to your Health Savings Account (HSA). There is also a Flexible Spending Account (FSA) option.
• Supplemental Benefits: Altana provides life, short- and long-term disability, and AD&D insurance coverage, all at no cost to you, so you know that you and your loved ones are covered in case of an emergency.
• 401(k) Savings: Save for and invest in your future using our Fidelity 401(k) retirement savings program.
• Commuter Benefits: Save money on your commute by setting aside pre-tax funds for public transit or parking!
• Wellness: Because we value mental and emotional health, every Altana employee has access to a free premium subscription to Calm, the #1 app for meditation, sleep, and mindfulness.
• Pet Insurance: Pets are family too! Keep them healthy with Wishbone insurance and / or our Total Pet vet service and telehealth discount plan.
• Employee Assistance Program: Free access to confidential personal support.
• Dependent Care FSA: You will have access to a Dependent Care FSA, which allows you to set aside pre-tax funds for childcare expenses

The recruiter assigned to this role can share more information about the specific compensation and benefit details associated with this role during the hiring process.