Chief Technology Officer — Quqo
Job Description | May 2026
The Company
Quqo is a B2B procurement-to-payment platform on the path to becoming a full-stack vertical operating system for healthcare. What started as a marketplace connecting small businesses with suppliers across Vietnam and Thailand has evolved into a two-business-unit company: a proven marketplace platform serving FMCG, pharma, and automotive distributors across Southeast Asia (including Shell and major pharmaceutical networks) and a new enterprise SaaS product being deployed to 700+ dental clinics across 11 European countries through a flagship partnership.
The Europe Healthcare product is currently live in the UK, Netherlands, and Sweden, and scaling to 11 countries throughout 2026. It is being built as an operating system across five integrated layers: procurement, clinic operations, AI procurement intelligence, patient experience, and a unified data and intelligence foundation. The roadmap for 2026 and 2027 requires building the remaining layers while simultaneously scaling the live product and preparing the AI layer for commercial upsell to enterprise clients. A high-margin expansion opportunity on top of an already-deployed base.
Quqo is a company with real traction, a distributed team that has built and shipped complex products under hard conditions. This is not a pre-revenue startup. This is a company at the inflection point between early product and scaled platform.
Why This Role, Why Now
Quqo has eight developers across Colombia, Vietnam, and Thailand. They have worked together for six years, built and maintained four live products on a consistent stack (Flutter, Golang, React, PostgreSQL, cloud microservices). They ship fast and take pride in what they have built.
Our goal for this year is clear: AI is not a feature to add later. It is the architecture to build from the beginning. Right now, engineering culture is traditional by design. AI is used for individual code optimization. No corporate accounts, no governance, no shared standards.
This role exists to change that. The CTO will turn a five-layer product vision into a concrete build plan and bring eight developers into AI-native development. Other team leaders are already willing to move in this direction. The conditions are good. What is missing is someone who has walked this path and can guide the team through it.
This is a builder role, not a delegation role. If you need a large team and a defined roadmap, this is not the right fit. If you want to build something significant from the inside, read on.
What You Will Own
Technical Strategy. Own the engineering roadmap. Define architecture for AI-powered features, demand forecasting, smart sourcing, intelligent recommendations, and build the data foundation they depend on.
AI Product Development. Take AI from prototype to production. Build governance that tracks consumption per developer and product. Decide the right model strategy based on requirements and data integrity needs.
Team Leadership. Lead a small, distributed team. Introducing AI into how people work creates friction. That is expected, not a problem. Your job is to guide the team through that change honestly: building trust through visible results and bringing people along.
Partnership with Product. Work in genuine alignment with the Product Manager. Move from specs-and-execution to shared ideation, prototyping, and shipping. Replace heavy process with shared principles.
Infrastructure. Own all infrastructure: cloud architecture, containerization, CI/CD, deployment. Build toward a setup that is ready to scale over time.
Who You Are
You build. You have shipped production software and can write code when the team needs it.
You have led technical teams through change, new tools, new ways of working, new standards, and you know how to bring people with you instead of leaving them behind. You lead with examples, not mandates. You are comfortable being in the room with developers who are skeptical, and you know that trust is built through visible results, not declarations.
What matters is that you have the instincts to foster a culture of learning and adoption, a clear point of view on when to use AI and when not to, and the patience to let the team find their footing.
You make decisions under uncertainty and course-correct quickly.
Technical:
Strong backend engineering (Golang preferred)
Distributed systems and microservices at production scale
AI/ML in production: data pipelines, evaluation, monitoring — not just API calls
RAG, agent orchestration, AI-native application design
Data engineering: unified models from heterogeneous sources, real-time and batch analytics
AI governance: cost tracking, model selection, access controls, output quality monitoring
Leadership:
Led distributed engineering teams with measurable results.
Led a technical team through a meaningful change, new tooling, process, or direction , and kept the team engaged through it.
Worked closely with a product counterpart in a fast-moving, shared-ownership model
Delivered in a lean startup environment.
Mindset:
You think in systems. When you design an AI feature, you are already thinking about the data and infrastructure it depends on.
You know whether a feature is worth the technical cost.
You have shipped AI features that failed. You know the difference between a demo and a product.
Nice to have: Experience with healthcare data, regulated industries, or European market requirements. Not expected on day one.
Ideal Background
Three profiles tend to succeed here:
Vertical SaaS or healthtech engineering leader who has built multi-layer platforms and is ready to set direction rather than execute within it.
AI-focused engineering leader with product instincts who has built production AI beyond LLM wrappers and knows how to bring a traditional team along.
Founder-adjacent technical leader who has been a founding engineer or early CTO, comfortable with the blank page, capable of building architecture, team, and process simultaneously.
What You Will Not Find Here
A staffed organization. No dedicated DevOps. No automated QA. No AI governance yet. Infrastructure is stable but held up by individual knowledge, not process. You are here to change that.
A defined roadmap. Significant parts of the product have not been built. The data model does not exist. You will be designing it.
A delegation-only role. You write the hard architecture proposal, prototype the difficult feature, and review code with credibility.
What You Will Find Here
A live product with real enterprise traction across a multi-country client network.
A team ready to be led. Experienced, loyal, and hungry to grow.
A strong technical foundation. Single backend language across all products, containerized microservices that have survived multiple pivots.
A real market gap. No competitor has fully integrated procurement, operations, AI intelligence, and patient engagement for healthcare clinic networks.
A CEO who wants a genuine technical partner. Someone who pushes back, proposes better approaches, and holds the technical north star with conviction.
Compensation and Structure
Full-time, permanent
Remote-first with regular in-person presence in Bogota and periodic visits to the Vietnam team
Compensation competitive with the European B2B SaaS market, discussed with shortlisted candidates
Reports directly to the CEO