Field CTO - Financial Services

The Field CTO is the highest individual contributor role in Customer Advisory. No direct reports. No management agenda. Just the deepest technical credibility in the room, applied to Backbase's most consequential customer relationships.

Externally, you carry the Field CTO title because that is what you are: a CTO-caliber technologist who sits on the customer side of the table. You earn the trust of bank CTOs and CIOs not by presenting slides, but by thinking alongside them — whiteboarding architecture at whatever level the conversation demands, challenging assumptions, and helping them see a path forward that they couldn't map on their own. Your authority is entirely earned. It comes from the quality of your thinking, your track record in banking technology, and your ability to hold your own in any room, from the data center to the boardroom.

Beyond individual accounts, you shape how the industry thinks. You publish. You speak at conferences. You brief Gartner and Forrester. You feed real market intelligence back into Backbase's Product and R&D organization in a way that changes what gets built. When a deal is complex, high-stakes, and needs someone who can speak both architecture and strategy, you are the one who gets the call.

• Key Responsibilities
• Own the technical relationship with C-level executives
• CTO, CIO, CDO
• at Backbase's most strategic banking customers. Build trusted advisor relationships that outlast individual deal cycles.
• Lead the technical dimension of high-stakes engagements where your input directly influences whether a bank commits to Backbase's platform.
• Get genuinely hands-on with architecture. Whiteboard end-state platform designs spanning the full Backbase stack, integrated into the customer's existing landscape
• at whatever level of depth the situation demands.
• Turn the hardest technical objections into wins by combining architectural fluency with business context. Know when a concern is real and when it's a negotiation.
• Drive competitive differentiation in head-to-head evaluations. Understand the competition deeply enough to dismantle their pitch without ever naming it.
• Represent Backbase externally at industry conferences, analyst briefings, and executive roundtables. Be someone the market recognizes and wants to hear from.
• Publish thought leadership on digital banking modernization, platform architecture, and the intersection of AI, cloud-native, and composable banking
• content that opens doors and shapes conversations before a sales cycle even starts.
• Translate customer challenges and market signals into actionable product input. Maintain a direct line into Product and R&D that makes Backbase's roadmap sharper and more defensible.
• Raise the technical bar across the Solutions Architecture community
• not through management, but through the quality of your work, your standards, and your willingness to go deep alongside Principal and Senior SAs on the problems that matter most.
• Stay ahead of technology trends in banking
• open banking, AI/ML, cloud transformation, regulatory tech
• and translate them into Backbase's competitive positioning before the market does. How to Grow in This Role This is a destination role on the individual contributor track. Growth is not about moving into management
• it is about expanding the scale and permanence of your impact.
• Deepen your influence on Backbase's platform direction. The best Field CTOs don't just react to the roadmap
• they shape it. That means becoming a trusted voice inside Product and R&D, not just a conduit for customer feedback.
• Become a recognized figure in the industry. Analyst relationships, conference keynotes, published frameworks, and a point of view that the market follows. The goal is for your name to carry weight independently of your title.
• Expand from regional to global strategic accounts. The most complex, high-profile banking transformations anywhere in the world should have your involvement
• whether you own them directly or set the technical direction others execute against.

• You have operated at the intersection of banking technology and enterprise architecture at the highest level
• either as a technology executive at a financial institution or as a Principal or Distinguished Architect with a track record of C-suite engagement. You understand what a bank CTO actually worries about. You can hold a credible conversation with their engineering leads in the morning and their board in the afternoon. You have built opinions about platform architecture that you are prepared to defend, and you know when to change your mind.