Vaughn Dickson

A CTO at your board table. One who still ships.

Vaughn Dickson CTO, Public Sector Network

I connect your technology to the numbers, the market and your customers, and explain it to your board in plain language. Fractional, interim, or full-time for the right company.

The platform I run today

All projects

Public Sector Network platform

2021–presentCTO

The community, events, learning and marketplace platform behind Public Sector Network, a free government-only network across Australia, New Zealand and North America. Built from scratch in 2022, and led as CTO ever since.

  • One platform PSN owns outright It replaced a WordPress site and third-party tools that did not talk to each other.
  • Reporting built in, not bought A reporting suite and data explorer replaced an off-the-shelf BI product.
  • One sign-in for members The community, events and academy share a single account.
  • Built for the scrutiny of government buyers I designed and run the architecture, the AWS estate and the delivery pipeline: behind Cloudflare's firewall, across two availability zones, with daily backups. In 2025 I moved the whole estate between AWS regions.
  • Changes ship faster, and safely Every push runs the full automated suite, grown from 67 tests to about 5,250 in under two years, and every release goes through staging before production.
  • Led the developers, then brought AI into the engineering Since April 2025 AI writes the code inside the platform's own guidelines, frameworks and skills, and I review every change and test it by hand, on top of the automated checks.
Read the case study

How to bring me in

How I work
Fractional or interim CTOExecutive technical leadership one to three days a week, or full-time for a defined period: strategy, architecture, hiring, vendors, the board pack, and a steady hand for your engineering leads.AI strategy and deliveryWhere generative AI pays off in your product and your engineering, where it does not yet, and a plan that ships.Technical due diligenceA fixed-scope review of code, architecture, security, team and operations, with a plain-language report and a prioritised risk list for investors, acquirers and boards. Then help fixing what matters.

Where I’ve worked

Role by role

Side projects

mdread2026 · A fast Markdown reader for large screens, in RustFlappycar2026 · A one-button browser game with ghost races sent by URL

Thinking in public

All writing

Your real team as CTO

One of the biggest mistakes new CTOs make is thinking their team is still the tech team. Your real team is the executive team, and that changes how you spend your week.

Career

Since 2025, building it differently

For twenty years as a CTO I have hired and led engineering teams, owned the architecture, the cloud and the security, and translated between the technology and the business. Since 2025 I have also shipped hands-on with AI tools in the loop, which changed what I believe a small team can ship and what a CTO should ask of one.

Need a CTO in the room?

Tell me what is going on. The first conversation is free, and I will say honestly whether I can help. If I can’t, I’ll introduce you to someone who can.

  1. A free call Thirty minutes on what is going on and whether I can help.
  2. A diagnostic A fixed-scope look at the code, team, roadmap and costs: a written assessment and a 90-day plan.
  3. The engagement Fractional, interim or full-time, with my exit planned from the start.

Cape Town, working remotely. My mornings overlap with Australian afternoons, and my afternoons with the UK, Europe and the US east coast. Or message me on LinkedIn.

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