Chief Product and Technology Officer
About the job
- Demonstrated AI-first development capability as an active practitioner able to lead a team through an AI development transformation.
- Strong technical foundation in infrastructure, architecture, and platform operations to earn the trust of a seasoned development team and support legacy modernization.
- Experience with hybrid, on-premise, or district-managed deployments.
- Ability to define a commercially grounded product roadmap beyond the existing customer base and own the product function.
- Experience building teams in small, complex environments by creating structure, accountability, and team cohesion.
- Change-management maturity to guide a long-tenured team toward new ways of working while preserving the culture and retaining valuable employees.
- US work authorization.
- Ability to work in Pacific Time.
- Low-ego, high-accountability leadership approach, with consistent follow-through and ability to build trust across teams.
- Credibility with technical and business stakeholders, including engineers, product leaders, long-tenured employees, and customer-facing teams.
- Sound judgment in pacing change in a mission-critical, relationship-driven environment.
- Define and own the multi-year product and technology roadmap, shifting Aequitas from a customer-reactive posture to a market-facing one.
- Establish formal product management practices, including roadmap ownership, prioritization frameworks, and release planning.
- Balance product investment and innovation with platform stability, particularly during California CALPADS and Michigan MiDataHub compliance reporting cycles.
- Partner with the Director of Customer Success and district stakeholders to ensure roadmap decisions reflect operational workflows.
- Support Sales and executive leadership with accurate product positioning as Aequitas pursues growth beyond its existing customer base.
- Lead implementation of AI-first development practices across engineering in alignment with Banyan’s AI mandate.
- Define and execute a practical, explainable AI product strategy that improves district staff productivity, data quality, and compliance confidence.
- Ensure AI design respects district data-locality expectations, deployment boundaries, and K–12 regulatory constraints.
- Partner with Banyan’s AI team and internal AI Council to evaluate tools, establish standards, and drive adoption across development.
- Lead approximately eight direct reports across development and database administration.
- Build team structure, shared processes, and cross-functional visibility across engineering.
- Establish development standards, quality expectations, and a release cadence supporting cloud and on-premise customers.
- Assess team capability and make necessary personnel decisions while exercising judgment in a culture that values long tenure and personal relationships.
- Own platform architecture strategy across cloud, hybrid, and on-premise deployment models.
- Define and execute modernization of a platform with a significant VB.NET legacy without disrupting mission-critical operations or customer experience.
- Ensure tenant isolation, security, and operational reliability across deployment models.
- Develop the on-premise managed-services opportunity as a strategic growth and retention lever.
- Serve as the primary executive authority for product and technology decisions.
- Partner with the Director of Customer Success on roadmap priorities, product-CS alignment, and development resource allocation.
- Engage the Michigan consortium as a co-development partner and navigate shared roadmap influence.
- Keep the CEO informed about key decisions, customer-facing risks, and strategic or reputational implications.
- K–12 software or EdTech experience, particularly familiarity with public-school district procurement, funding, and technology implementation.
- Experience modernizing legacy technology and migrating from an existing stack without disrupting a mission-critical customer base; VB.NET familiarity is a plus.
- Experience at companies with fewer than 200 employees or at a comparable organizational scale.
- Based in Southern California.
About the company
Banyan Software is a private investment firm that buys profitable, niche B2B software providers and keeps them under long-term ownership. It focuses on enterprise software with recurring revenue and strong market positions, often from founders seeking stable ownership. The firm does not resell its acquisitions; instead it preserves each company’s legacy, autonomy, brand, and leadership, while offering operational support as needed. Banyan’s portfolio spans industries such as healthcare, education, legal, and public safety, all centered on essential software infrastructure. The company operates with a permanence mindset and aims to create long-term value, positioning itself as a trusted, mission-aligned partner for founders and families who want continuity rather than an exit.
Company Size
51-200
Company Stage
Debt Financing
Total Funding
$20K
Headquarters
Atlanta, Georgia
Founded
2016
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- July 2026 HMM and Questi deals expand Banyan deeper into regulated healthcare and education.
- June 2026 France office targets French VMS founders with ten hires by year-end.
- Headcount rose to 1,967 by March 2026, showing hiring despite a 1.1% annual dip.
What critics are saying
- A 2026 acquisition spree risks integration drift across 15 companies and 100-plus portfolios.
- Founder-led autonomy creates succession risk when CEOs retire or lose momentum after deals.
- Evergreen ownership blocks exit premiums; if growth stalls, Banyan faces permanent capital drag.
What makes Banyan Software unique
- June 2026 France launch and €100 million envelope prove permanent capital scaling globally.
- Banyan keeps founders like Simunix's John Lewis and ITG's Mauro Costa operating autonomously.
- More than 100 portfolio companies give Banyan shared AI expertise across niche vertical software.
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Benefits
Health Insurance
Company Equity
Performance Bonus
Company News
Demarest and BZCP advise on the acquisition of ITG by Banyan Software. * Corporate * 2 September 2026 * 2 minutes read BZCP Advogados advised ITG (Informação, Tecnologia e Gerência), a Brazilian company specializing in software solutions for regulatory compliance in the insurance sector, on the sale of the company to Banyan Software, which was advised by Demarest... The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. As part of the transaction, ITG will continue to operate under its own brand and retain operational autonomy within the Banyan Software group. Mauro Sapiro Pinto da Costa, one of the company's founders, will remain at the helm of the business as CEO. The transaction aligns with Banyan Software's strategy of acquiring vertical software companies with niche market positions and long-standing customer relationships. For ITG, joining the group is intended to accelerate its growth and expand its investment capacity while preserving its identity, team and focus on the Brazilian insurance market. Demarest advised Banyan and relied on partners José Diaz, Juliana Maluf, André Novaski, Roberto Casarini, Camila G. Dayrell Garrote, Tatiana Campello, Renato Canizares, associates Maria Julia Franco, Dora Pimentel, Henrique Dias, Nathalia Sanches, Luiza Mendonça, Betina Ferreira, Cecília Cunha, Patrick Lobo, Ivan Lima. BZCP advised ITG and relied on Marcelo Shima, partner in the M&A practice, with support from associates Leonardo Biglia and Sofia Kalil. Pictured: Diaz and Shima
Banyan Software has acquired Questi, a Geel-based educational software provider, marking its third acquisition in Belgium and sixth in the Benelux region. The transaction follows Banyan's recent purchase of healthcare nomenclature specialist Besco. Founded in 2012 by primary school teachers, Questi streamlines lesson planning and tracks student development across Dutch, French, and English. The platform serves over 1,000 primary schools, 25,000 teachers, and 300,000 students across Belgium through three connected modules for teachers, parents, and students. Banyan plans to maintain Questi's existing team under its buy-and-hold model. Co-founder and CEO Lisa Van Houdt said the company sought a partner to support growth opportunities whilst protecting its founder-accessible support approach. Banyan will leverage its international network to help expand Questi's reach.
Banyan Software has acquired Besco to accelerate the global rollout of its hospital tracking and billing platforms.MandA
Banyam’s Aussie customer retention platform now pairs up with Harrier National
The right move, the right people, at the right time. Michael Parrella Aug 11, 2026 CEO Perspective Last month at Banyan Software's CEO Summit in Toronto, I accepted an M&A leadership award in a room of about 125 portfolio company CEOs. The theme was resourcefulness under pressure - the ability to build from what you have when the situation demands it. I'm grateful for the recognition. And I've spent the time since thinking about what the award actually represents - because the answer is bigger than one deal. More than the sum of the parts. The award centers on an acquisition I pushed for, had rejected, reframed, and ultimately closed with Banyan's backing. It's performing well. But if I'm being honest, the deal was the easy part. The hard part - the part that doesn't fit neatly into an award narrative - was the work its people did after the ink dried. On paper, this merger combined two companies. In practice, it was more like 1 + 1 = 10. SoftSmiths, Inc. came into it with more than 200 combined years of energy market expertise across trading, scheduling, risk management, and operations. These aren't people who read about energy markets. They've lived in them - managing books through polar vortexes, navigating FERC filings at 2 a.m., building hedging strategies that kept companies solvent when their competitors went under. The acquisition brought a team of engineers and product builders who think in algorithms, not slide decks - people who had already been pioneering AI-native approaches to problems most of the industry was still solving with spreadsheets. Put those two groups in the same room and something happens that neither team could have produced on its own. Energy veterans who know exactly what a 15-minute dispatch window means to a REP's P&L start working side by side with engineers who can build the AI optimization model to capture it. The people who've spent decades understanding why a decision matters are now paired with the people who can automate how it gets made - thousands of times a day, at every meter, without a human bottleneck. That combination doesn't just add capability. It multiplies it. Risk360 is ennrgy.com's system of record: load forecasting, risk management, portfolio hedging, and settlements, all on one platform. Asset Optimizer is the system of action: AI-powered battery dispatch that turns a fleet of distributed energy resources into a coordinated margin engine. These two halves work together in a way neither could deliver alone - and the team that built the bridge between them is the reason the math came out to ten, not two. The award recognized the judgment to see that combination coming. What makes me proud is the team that turned the bet into a product. The grid doesn't need more power. It needs more intelligence. Timing in energy markets is everything. You can build the right product at the wrong moment and it doesn't matter. SoftSmiths, Inc. is not in that position. Here's a number that should bother everyone in this industry: the average utilization of the U.S. grid - the grid that ratepayers have already paid for - is less than 50%. The system is congested for a handful of hours and idle for most of them. SoftSmiths, Inc. has $1.4 trillion in capital expenditures planned through 2030, rate increases running as far as the eye can see, and a transmission and interconnection queue that stretches years into the future. Gas turbines are sold out through 2031. High-voltage transformer lead times run 160 to 200 weeks. New thermal generation takes five to seven years from permit to power. Battery energy storage systems? Twelve to twenty-four months from interconnection to online. ERCOT alone has gone from roughly 8.6 GW of installed BESS capacity at the end of 2024 to over 16 GW today - battery storage now represents 19% of ERCOT's peak capacity. In PJM, that number is 0.2%. That gap is the single widest structural divergence in the U.S. power market, and it tells you everything about where this is headed. The grid has a rush-hour problem. Everyone's trying to jam more power through the same wires at the same time. What batteries do is the equivalent of a reverse commute - they absorb energy when the system is idle and deliver it when the pipes are full. You don't need to build more infrastructure. You need to use what's already there more intelligently. That's not a technology problem. It's a coordination problem. And it's exactly the kind of problem SoftSmiths, Inc. built ennrgy.com to solve. Here's the insight that changes the conversation: behind-the-meter storage is not arriving as a hardware market. It's arriving as a retail energy supply business model. Look at the companies winning in this space. They're not battery manufacturers who bolted on a retail license. They're retailers who figured out that owning the battery - or at least controlling its dispatch - lets them capture value that a pure supplier never could: the capacity obligation, the physical hedge, and the customer relationship, all in one. The DER revolution the industry has been talking about for a decade is finally here, and it's being led by energy companies, not equipment vendors. Some of those retailers will build their own behind-the-meter BESS capacity. Most won't. The ones who don't will need someone to supply the intelligence layer - the per-meter, real-time optimization that turns a fleet of residential batteries into a virtual power plant that actually performs. That's the opening. And that's exactly what Asset Optimizer was built for. It doesn't manage batteries in aggregate. It manages them individually - every 15 minutes, every meter, using AI that learns from market conditions, weather patterns, load shapes, and grid signals to make dispatch decisions no human team could replicate at scale. And because it connects directly to Risk360, every dispatch decision flows into the same platform where the REP is managing positions, hedges, and settlements. The system of action talks to the system of record. The back office sees what the battery is doing, in real time, and understands what it means for the book. That connection - behind-the-meter intelligence feeding directly into enterprise risk management - is where SoftSmiths, Inc. believe the VPP space is headed. Most of the industry is still treating battery optimization and energy trading as separate problems, handled by separate teams with separate tools. SoftSmiths, Inc. is not. SoftSmiths, Inc. built ennrgy.com to treat them as one problem, because that's what they are. SoftSmiths, Inc. already have a live Asset Optimizer client in production. SoftSmiths, Inc. is not talking about what SoftSmiths, Inc. plan to build. SoftSmiths, Inc. is operating. And every week of real-world dispatch data makes the AI sharper and the case for this approach harder to argue with. Proof, not a finish line. Third-party validation from 125 peer-level operators means something different than a press release. These are CEOs who understand what it costs to build in hard markets. When ennrgy.com appeared in four separate presentations at the summit, including the CEO's opening keynote, it wasn't because of marketing. It was because the product story holds up under scrutiny from people who run companies for a living. The award tells me SoftSmiths, Inc. is on the right track. It doesn't tell me SoftSmiths, Inc. is done. SoftSmiths, Inc. don't need to be everywhere at once. SoftSmiths, Inc. need to find the spots where the market is ready and the customers are investing, and hit those spots. ERCOT is there today. Other markets are lining up behind it. As each domino falls, SoftSmiths, Inc.'ll be positioned - not scrambling to catch up, but already operating, already proving it out, already smarter from the dispatch data SoftSmiths, Inc. has been collecting. SoftSmiths, Inc. has a platform built around the belief that no one should make a high-stakes energy decision in the dark. SoftSmiths, Inc. has an AI-native engineering model that's accelerating. SoftSmiths, Inc. is pioneering behind-the-meter intelligence in a market where most participants are still figuring out how to connect their BESS fleet to their back office. And behind all of it, SoftSmiths, Inc. has a team of people who genuinely care about this industry - who chose energy because the problems are hard and the stakes are real, not because it was the easy path. I didn't build any of this alone. The people at ennrgy.com did. I'm proud to work alongside them, and I'm more focused than ever on what SoftSmiths, Inc. build next. Ready to see what ennrgy.com is building? From risk management to AI-powered battery dispatch - one platform, one team.