Great Yellow
Chief Technology Officer
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At Great Yellow we're looking for a CTO to join our team.
About The Job
Great Yellow is building the intelligence layer that will fundamentally reshape how land-use decisions are made, financed and scaled. Our mission is to make regenerative land-use investable and scalable, and our vision is a world where land-use decisions are systematically aligned across nature, infrastructure, agricultural production and human wellbeing. We help businesses, investors, and land managers move from intention to investable action on regenerative land-use. This is a system designed not just to analyse the world, but to actively coordinate regenerative land-use across landscapes, supply chains and asset classes.
We've spent two years working across nature restoration projects and seeing the same pattern. Complex multi-party funding, scattered data, fragmented coordination between landowners, ecologists, investors, and corporates. Regen land-use is held back as much by infrastructure gaps as by capital gaps. Our answer is a Operating System platform that pulls it all together. The data backbone makes sense of geospatial layers, ecological baselines and outcomes, financial structures, and project operations (geospatial in particular is the spine of natural capital and a serious engineering problem at scale). The customer facing operating system help businesses and land managers navigate the natural capital journey, from baseline through capital structure to verified outcomes. The internal Operating System lets our commercial verticals (Trade, Capital, Nature Projects, Systems) move faster on every engagement, and feeds a learning loop that compounds across projects.
Our CEO Ed holds a technically complex and genuinely differentiated vision for what this Operating System platform can become. What is missing is the tech leader to build upon and translate that vision technically and to lead our various tech functions.
This is the founding technical leadership role. You’ll work alongside a multi-disciplinary team and leadership who care deeply about getting this right for the long term. You also aren’t expecting to inherit a built team with settled product-market fit, and you’re excited about the opportunity to learn as we go and get some things wrong on the way. We have a small but strong tech team across engineering, product, data, and design. We have growing internal data and modelling capability.
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What You’ll Do
- Deeply understand Great Yellow’s ambitious vision – technically complex, commercially ambitious, and constantly evolving – and make it legible, concrete, and actionable for Engineering, Product, and Data. Turn it into a clear story that the wider Great Yellow team and investor can back.
- Set and own the multi-year technical strategy: architecture, stack, AI and ML direction, data and geospatial infrastructure, security and compliance.
- Lead the Tech vertical (Engineering, Product, Data and AI) as one integrated function, serving Trade, Capital, Nature Projects, and Systems without fragmenting into bespoke builds.
- Sit on the ExCo as the technical voice on company strategy, working in a peer group with MD Operations, MD Commercial, and Financial Director/CFO.
- Grow, lead and coach the Tech team toward our 2027 org vision. Hire well, create clarity on vision and how we’ll get there, and set a high bar for performance, pace and ownership.
- Build the case for technology investment across the organisation and with investors, positioning our platform capability as a core competitive advantage, and working with MD Operations to raise the technology bar and AI enablement across the whole company.
- Stay ahead of the tech landscape, particularly in AI/ML, data infrastructure, and geospatial. Pull what matters into our roadmap and use it to refine and grow our vision.
- Represent Great Yellow externally with investors, partners, and industry forums.
About You
You bring both technical depth and leadership experience. You have built and scaled technology teams before; you know what good looks like across engineering, product, and data, and you are energized to be the person bringing it all together. You are comfortable at the executive table and equally comfortable going deep on a tricky architecture decision.
- Vision translation: You take complex strategic intent and turn it into a technical direction the team can move on. You're comfortable holding the big picture and the architectural detail in the same conversation.
- Technical depth: You have grounded expertise across software engineering, cloud infrastructure, and data systems. You don't need to write production code regularly, but you engage credibly with architects and engineers on trade-offs and risk. You understand the challenges and opportunities behind geospatial data and can work with NatCap geospatial experts.
- Strategic leadership: You have led product and technology functions at a senior level, setting direction and vision and also managing delivery. You know how to build a roadmap that earns trust internally and credibility externally.
- Experience in a matrixed org. You've led a function inside a matrixed or multi-vertical org and understand the patterns and pitfalls, like how to set shared standards without flattening verticals, how to navigate competing priorities, and how to keep a central roadmap coherent.
- AI and ML fluency. You've shipped, or led teams who've shipped, production features where LLMs are built into the architecture. You’re familiar with the complexities of cost, latency, evaluation loops, and failure modes and have a view on what good decision-support design looks like with agentic patterns.
- Builder mentality: You are energized by 0→1 environments. You make decisive, pragmatic choices when the path is unclear, and you create momentum even in ambiguous conditions.
- People leadership: You can lead and develop a cross-functional technical team including strong specialists. You raise the talent bar around you.
- Communication: You translate complex technical decisions into clear language for non-technical executive team, board, and investor audiences.
- Industry presence. You have, or are actively building, a profile in the spaces that matter for our next phase: enterprise tech, AI, geospatial, nature finance. A network we can lean on for product and data partnerships, and a name that adds weight when we talk to tech-focused investors.
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Nice to haves
- Experience in fintech, natural capital, sustainability platforms, or nature-adjacent markets.
- You care deeply about nature, climate, and the potential of technology to drive environmental change.
Practical info
- Location: London hub, hybrid. We value team time in the office, ideally one to two days a week.
- Compensation: Competitive executive base amongst scale-ups, meaningful pre-Series-A equity, full benefits, learning budget. Your expectations and our band to be shared on first conversation
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Do you want to join our team? Then we'd love to hear about you!
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