Chief Technology Officer

About Us

Scratch Financial (“Scratch”) is a late-stage venture-backed financial technology business based in Pasadena, California. At Scratch, everything starts and ends with our mission: being the payment partner of choice for veterinary practices and helping pet parents access the care their animals need without financial barriers. Driven by our award-winning technology, Scratch has become the fastest-growing financing provider in veterinary care, with a partner network of 15,000+ practices across the U.S. and Canada.

Scratch has two main products:

• Scratch Pay: Point-of-sale client-facing lending, including a BNPL offering and longer-term payment plans
• Scratch Checkout: Payment processing integrated with veterinary practice management software

We are a company built on transforming the way pet healthcare payments are done, looking for innovators who share our commitment to shaping the future of veterinary care financing.

About the Role

We're looking for a Chief Technology Officer to lead our engineering, infrastructure, and security functions (~30-person team) through a period of growth and potential sale. This is a hands-on leadership role where you'll build operational maturity, technical standards, and team capability while keeping the organization stable and motivated through change. You'll spend meaningful time in the weeds—reviewing architecture, unblocking teams, and setting the technical bar—while building the structure and delegation that lets the org run without you as the bottleneck.

Responsibilities

• Build engineering process and operational maturity from the ground up—architecture, coding standards, CloudOps, GitOps, and security practices—closing current gaps in monitoring, alerting, and observability.
• Revitalize and run our security function—own security as a first-class function, including audits, compliance readiness (e.g., SOC2/GDPR/HIPAA-type frameworks), application hardening, and incident response.
• Bring a credible AI and engineering vision—with a substantiated point of view on where AI creates leverage for the team and product—grounded in hands-on experience.
• Lead a distributed, remote-first engineering team—guiding and delegating rather than micromanaging, while staying technical enough to debug complex issues and review architecture.
• Operate with commercial and financial fluency—tie technology decisions to cost and business value, balancing speed and perfection as needed.
• Communicate with transparency and discretion—clear, tactful, and calibrated for the audience, whether internal teams or external parties during sensitive processes.

Requirements

Experience & Track Record

• Has led a company through a sale on the sell side, including hands-on experience preparing for diligence.
• Has personally built observability, alerting, and security systems from near-ground-zero—not simply inherited existing systems.
• Has led a security function directly, with real exposure to audits and compliance processes.
• Has hands-on experience with agentic AI development and can speak to its genuine applications.
• Comes from a background in distributed cloud backends, database scaling, and API architecture—not primarily mobile or front-end/client-side engineering.
• If several years removed from hands-on technical work, that’s workable; a decade or more away is not.

Technical Approach

• Advocates for pragmatic, scalable architecture (modular monoliths over premature microservices) and strong FinOps discipline around cloud cost.
• Comfortable owning Stripe-style payment internals (subscriptions, webhooks, ledgering) and designing secure third-party integrations.
• Committed to SDLC rigor, especially if coming from an ops-heavy background.
• Flexible on specific tooling—looking for strong judgment and principles, not attachment to a particular stack or vendor.

Leadership & Working Style

• Comfortable with ambiguity and shifting business or product requirements; doesn’t need a fully specified brief to move forward.
• Operates roughly 30% hands-on / 70% structuring, delegating, and managing—hands-on enough to stay credible but builds a bench rather than becoming the bottleneck.
• Genuinely curious about the business, customers, and problems being solved; treats being wrong as useful information.
• Proactive by default: drives process or structural gaps to resolution rather than stopping at written recommendations.
• Low ego about role and process—comfortable with Scratch’s specific ways of operating even where they differ from past companies.
• Shares credit generously ("we" over "I") and handles high-pressure mistakes without assigning blame.
• Builds trust deliberately during organizational change and works inclusively across a distributed, international team.

Benefits

• Competitive base salary ranging from $300,000 - $350,000
• Participation in the company’s equity and leadership bonus programs
• Remote-first company with hybrid options (Pasadena office available)
• Unlimited PTO
• Covered healthcare
• 401k match
• Cell plan reimbursement
• Monthly recognition opportunities
• Learning platforms and resources for professional growth
• Equity retention policy to ensure financial growth alongside the company
• Generous parental leave