The Drupal Association, with the help of a Search Committee comprised of Board and Advisory Board members, is beginning a search for a Chief Technical Officer (CTO) for Drupal.org (not the Drupal software project). The CTO will fill a critical role for the both the Association and the community, working at the strategic level with the Drupal.org Working Groups to build a roadmap for Drupal.org, create and manage processes critical to the success of the site (including security and disaster recovery), and ensure that Drupal.org roadmaps are met. A CTO role ensures that Drupal.org has the technical and strategic oversight needed to drive improvements and innovations. Specifically we want to ensure that we have the best platform for developers, community involvement, and critical revenue-generating opportunities.

The CTO is the first of several hires we will make over the course of the next few months to significantly increase our ability to improve the experience of Drupal.org for our many constituents. More specific details about the hiring plan will be available when the Association's 2014 Leadership Plan and Budget are approved by the board (hopefully at next week's board meeting), but these hires will include more development and devops bandwidth, among other things. In short, this is a really exciting time to work on Drupal.org!

We're asking for your help to find the right person for this role. We're looking for someone with strong product management skills, a community player who can work with our broad base of remarkable volunteers, and the experience to guide and manage our development, infrastructure and operations teams. Please review and share the Drupal Association CTO Job Description.

We've also included a little more context below if you want to learn more. And, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Why a CTO? Isn’t that a bit much for our needs?

Our focus at the Association in 2013 has been re-aligning Association resources to bring more support and funding to our community’s most important asset: Drupal.org. During the last 9 months, we've begun diversifying our revenue streams so that we can scale our income and provide more funding for Drupal.org projects. We launched Working Groups to manage the strategic direction and policy setting we need to make good decisions for the site. Most recently, we hired a Technology Manager for the Association so that our limited technical staff can focus more fully on Drupal.org.

In 2014, we are planning for an even more dramatic shift, bringing on engineering and infrastructure staff to pay off years of technical debt and begin to move the site forward with new developer tools, better site performance, and strong security practices. We’re incredibly excited to help the community move Drupal.org forward and really meet community needs. We see the CTO role as essential to making this happen. It sets us up to proactively address Drupal.org needs at a strategic level - forecasting necessary changes before they become critical problems.

Isn’t this the role of the Working Groups?

Yes - the Working Group charters put them in charge of direction-setting and strategy for the sites. We anticipate that the CTO will work closely with the Working Groups to coordinate their work and ensure that those decisions are translated into a cohesive roadmap. Additionally, the Working Groups are not designed to implement the roadmap. The CTO will oversee the team that does that - either in-house, using 3rd party tools, through contractors, with volunteers, or a combination of these options.

Are you going to hire from within the community?

We are certainly going to look within the community. We will also look outside the Drupal community. The committee seeks a candidate who brings a breadth of experience and knowledge regarding open source community sites.

Is this a technical role or a business role?

We expect that the right candidate will have equal parts technical chops and business savvy. We are not expecting the CTO to write production code, but the CTO will have to know how to do that so that they can manage it well. Additionally, the CTO will need to understand business problems and how technology can be strategically deployed to meet those needs.

Where will the position be based?

Ideally, in Portland, OR, at the Drupal Association headquarters. We know however, that this is likely unrealistic as a hard and fast constraint, and will encourage applicants from around the globe.