Chief Technology Officer

Leeds, England, United Kingdom

Footballco is the world's largest football content and media business. Our mission is to give fans more of the game by building football communities that entertain, inform, and inspire action. We are a team of over 300 people, in 16 countries around the world, working across both our own media brands such as GOAL, MUNDIAL, CALCIOMERCATO and KOOORA and working on partnerships with leading clubs, leagues and brands.

About The Role:

You will join Footballco (“FC”) to lead and enhance our product proposition and engineering prowess, across all our global publishing brands, GOAL, Kooora, CalcioMercato, SPOX, VoetbalZone, INDIVISA and MUNDIAL.

ou will lead an existing team of 60+ FTEs, split across different functions and geographies, from Leeds, UK to Katowice, Poland. A group of passionate designers, UX specialists, developers, testers, product and project managers.

Your main challenge will be to continue to evolve our products (web/app), distribution platforms (GNews, ChatGPT, etc) and speed to market, in order to move the business beyond the success we’ve had to date. As the digital media world has moved beyond impressions and flash-in-pan social, we need to build franchises, better package our ad proposition, develop additional distribution platforms / revenue streams and drive efficiencies. We need to integrate our 5 different web publishing brands into one CMS, one UX template, one tech stack, as well as find new ways of leveraging AI and it’s multitude of applications

You will be given room to reimagine our product & engineering management team, giving you runway to drive change at pace and taking into account that most of your organisation is based in Leeds (Product), Katowice (Product/Engineering), as well as smaller development pods in Italy, Germany and Middle East.

What you will be doing:

Retool strategy and implement changes across our platform in order to take advantage of both the efficiencies and distribution opportunities that AI will bring

Take our product (web/app) to a new level on GOAL, focusing on building a world-class, global publishing franchise

Continue to integrate our Local Champion brands - VoetbalZone, Spox, CalcioMercato and Kooora - into THE FC tech stack

Move our product design and UX practice forward, putting more rigour into what makes a best-in-class UX

Implement a tighter and faster process to ship product changes, reducing our time-to-market and putting us ahead of competition and industry shifts

Drive more efficiency and effectiveness from our engineering team, mainly based in Poland. Considering all options and including relocation if necessary

Reimage our content production workflow/platforms, in order to improve margin and integrate existing platforms like social, as well as new ones like ChatGPT

Supported by content, sales strategy and creative teams, drive better packaging of our brands, formats and platforms - from MUNDIAL, to GOAL (web/app), to INDIVISA

Continue to drive our revenue diversification beyond standard media / branded content, by pushing affiliate/betting and subscription further and developing new ways of monetizing our video, audio, text and scores content

Be at the forefront of our FC Precision product, which encompasses 1st party / authentication, DMP, segmentation and audience targeting across advanced ad markets like UK and US

Responsibilities:

Oversee Product and Engineering P&L and Long Term Model (“LTM”)

As part of FC’s Senior Leadership Team, drive overall business strategy and direction, while participating in shareholder pacing calls and board meetings

Product and technology roadmap, taking into account immediate needs and long term opportunities

Imagine new delivery model (engineering org structure), taking into account our need to speed up delivery across all the areas described in the previous section

Content creation & distribution platform strategy across text, video, audio and scores, spanning 6 web/app brands reaching ~80M UVs and dozens of social handles/brands delivering .75-1bn video views per month. All published in 18 languages, targeting 9 Key Markets (UK, FR, ES, DE, IT, NL, GCC, US, JP), plus 5 Growth Markets (ID, BR, MX, KR, Africa)

M&A integration planning and execution at product & engineering levels

What you have:

Built or scaled a digital media/tech product or content platform, not necessarily in sports

Strong understanding of the global digital media landscape, including what it means to operate a multi-market, multi-language, multicultural organization

Tech and development chops in order to challenge our existing dev teams and their speed to market

Led the positioning and packing of an ad-funded proposition, with its local-market nuances

Experience in embracing new technologies, ideally having hands-on experience on GenAI implementations

Led an ad funded product proposition and team in a high pace / high growth environment

Desirable:

Understanding of the football industry and in particular local trends in FC’s Key Markets

Experience in digital publishing revenue transformation. From ad funded to affiliate, subscription, commerce, as well as other content syndication

Ability to scale dev teams in different locations around the world

Experience with high growth and/or venture funded companies

Footballco is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to, and will not be discriminated against based on age, race, gender, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability or any other protected category.