CTO & Enterprise Engineer (SaaS B2B)

CTO & Enterprise Engineer (SaaS B2B) — smartNsales AG

Lucerne, Switzerland · Full-time · Member of the Management Team

IMPORTANT: This is an in-office position. Applicants must currently live in or near Lucerne, Switzerland. Candidates must be fluent in both German and English; French is a plus.

About smartNsales AG

smartNsales AG is a Swiss B2B ecosystem built for the CPG sector. Two products.

smartNsales Marketplace is a booking platform where brands reserve shelf space, promotional slots, and in-store activations at retail locations — brands get distribution reach, locations earn revenue.

smartNsales Enterprise is a SaaS platform built for CPG brands to manage Key Account Management (KAM), trade marketing, trade activations, field execution, and budget control from one place.

Founder-led, headquartered in Lucerne.

The Role

We are looking to hire a CTO & Enterprise Engineer (SaaS B2B) to lead the next stage of our products' scale, unification, and AI-driven evolution.

You will own the entire technical organisation at smartNsales. You will be the technical decision-maker across the marketplace, the Enterprise SaaS, and the team. You will own architecture, product, and execution from MVP to scale.

This is a highly hands-on leadership role with full ownership across engineering, architecture, delivery standards, platform reliability, and AI direction. The right person will be expected to raise the engineering bar, improve execution velocity, strengthen data trust, and help define how AI becomes embedded into the core operating logic of our products.

The role is hands-on. Your primary job in the first months is building SNS Enterprise (SaaS) yourself, working directly with the CPO and the CEO to shape the product as you build it. On the marketplace side, there is already a senior tech lead running day-to-day development with other senior engineers and a QA under him. You provide oversight, set standards, and make sure both products stay coherent. When Enterprise is ready to scale, you bring in a senior engineer for this business unit and build the team from there.

If you want to manage without building, this is not the right role. If you want full technical ownership of a real product at an early stage, read on.

Your Responsibilities

Technology vision & strategy

• Own the technology vision, roadmap, and engineering strategy across both products. Set the standards for code quality, deployment, and how the team works.
• Lead adoption of AI-assisted development tooling to multiply team productivity.
• Maintain high standards of software quality, performance, security, and reliability.
• Stay ahead of industry trends and translate them into competitive advantages.

Hands-on product engineering

• Build SNS Enterprise from its early-stage foundation. You work with the management team to define it as you go. Once growing, you hire a senior engineer and lead the team.
• Own database design, Prisma schema evolution, multi-tenant data model, migration and integration strategy.
• Own the full stack from schema design to frontend quality, test coverage, and CI pipeline.

Team leadership

• Lead the engineering team - setting technical direction, reviewing architecture decisions, and raising the bar on delivery standards across both products.
• Coach and mentor engineers to reach their full potential. Set clear expectations and create real opportunities for growth.
• Define engineering roles, interview candidates, and onboard future hires.

What We Are Looking For

• 8+ years in software engineering, with 5+ years in senior engineering leadership (VP/Director/CTO) at a SaaS company.
• Strong infrastructure background with experience running large-scale distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and making strategic tradeoffs between cost, maintenance burden, and engineering velocity.
• You write production code regularly, not only when things break.
• Strong Next.js / React / TypeScript.
• Solid backend reasoning across Python/Django, PostgreSQL, Redis.
• A track record of shipping B2B SaaS products end-to-end.
• Comfortable with Docker, GitLab CI/CD, and multi-environment deployments.
• You have managed teams of engineers before. You have already worked in an intensive startup or scale-up environment, not only corporate roles.
• Excellent communication skills. Comfortable presenting to boards, working with executives, and collaborating cross-functionally.

Nice-to-have:

• CPG, retail tech, or trade/KAM background.
• ISO 27001 or SOC 2 experience.

What We Offer

A base salary of CHF 120,000–160,000 depending on experience, plus a significant upside as the company scales. A seat on the Management Team from day one. An office in the heart of Lucerne. This is an early-stage role; the upside is real but so is the ambiguity. We want someone who sees that as an opportunity, not a risk.

How to Apply

Send a note to [email protected]. Tell us what you have built and what you would look at first if you joined tomorrow.