Vaughn Dickson

I am a CTO and software engineer based in Cape Town. I have spent twenty-five years building software for SaaS and platform companies, twenty of them leading engineering as CTO, in startups and corporates, from a first commit to a platform a hundred thousand people rely on.

Since late 2021 I have been CTO of Public Sector Network, a government-only professional network across Australia, New Zealand and North America. I built its platform from an empty repository in January 2022, led a small team, moved the estate between AWS regions, took it through ISO 27001 readiness, and since 2025 have run it as a team of one with AI tooling in the loop. The case study has the detail.

Before that I was CTO of Wizenoze, an ed-tech scale-up in Amsterdam, where we built a web-scale crawler and search platform that classified content by reading level with machine learning. Earlier I spent eight years as CTO of Stem Software in Cape Town, building the SaaS ERP for retail and hospitality that the company still sells, and I wrote code at Fundamo (a Visa company), Cognician, Pick n Pay and Obsidian Systems: distributed search, mobile-money transaction engines, data pipelines, and web applications at every size in between.

What I believe about the job: a CTO’s real team is the executive team, not the engineering team. The work is connecting the technology to the financials, the market and the customers, and translating in both directions. I have written about that. I still write code because it keeps my judgement honest; the side projects on this site are the evidence.

I work as a fractional and interim CTO for SaaS and platform companies, do technical due diligence for investors and boards, and help leadership teams decide where generative AI pays off. For the right company I would join full-time. Consulting explains how that works, and my CV has the roles.

Reading

The books that shaped how I design systems and run teams are on the recommended reading list.