Vaughn Dickson

Summary

Hands-on executive technical leader. I have built three platforms from scratch, each carrying several products customers rely on, hired and led the teams that run them, and sat at the leadership table for the financials, the market and the customers, not just the infrastructure. Since 2025 I have also run the engineering of a 105,000-line production platform hands-on: AI writes the code inside guidelines, frameworks and skills I set, and I review and test every change myself on top of the automated checks. Open to fractional, interim and full-time CTO roles, remote from Cape Town (UTC+2).

Selected outcomes

• 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.
• Python 3.9 to 3.14, Django 4.0 to 5.2 LTS and Wagtail 6.1 to 7.4, upgraded in steps and never more than one LTS behind

Experience

1. 2021–present

   Chief Technology Officer, Public Sector Network

   Australia, remote from Cape Town

   Built the community, events, learning and marketplace platform behind a government-only professional network from the first commit; led the engineering team, the architecture and the AWS estate through a region move; and since 2025 have run its engineering hands-on with AI tooling in the loop.

2. 2014–present

   Fractional CTO, Vaughn Dickson Consulting

   Cape Town

   Fractional and interim CTO work, technical due diligence and AI strategy for SaaS and platform companies, alongside the full-time roles below.

3. 2014–2021

   Chief Technology Officer, Wizenoze

   Amsterdam and Cape Town

   Recruited and led the development team and ran product development at an ed-tech scale-up: a web-scale crawler and search platform that classified content by reading level with machine learning, served through APIs, SDKs and classroom apps, on AWS with a full CI/CD pipeline.

4. 2012–2014

   Staff Engineer, Cognician

   Cape Town

   Took the Clojure and Datomic rewrite of a coaching platform to production within two months of joining, and automated the AWS estate.

5. 2011–2012

   Senior Developer, Fundamo, a Visa company

   Cape Town

   Integrated a mobile-money transaction engine with banking, SMS and USSD channels, built the load-testing tools that found its concurrency bugs, and trained Visa staff in Singapore to support it.

6. 2003–2011

   Chief Technology Officer, Stem Software

   Cape Town

   Built the web-based ERP for retailers, supermarkets and restaurants that the company is based on, as its only developer for the first four years and then with a development team I scaled out and trained; it is still selling.

7. 2002–2003

   Senior Developer, Pick n Pay

   Cape Town

   Stocktake software and data pipelines off legacy systems for one of South Africa’s largest retailers.

8. 2001–2002

   Programmer, Obsidian Systems

   Cape Town

   A real-time freight auction platform with a custom workflow engine, and an online flight-booking framework integrated with legacy systems.

Skills

Technical strategy and architecture · engineering leadership, hiring and mentoring · AWS and Cloudflare · Python, Django and Wagtail · Java and the JVM · Rust and JavaScript · PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch · generative AI in product and in the engineering loop · technical due diligence · board and investor communication.

Writing

Essays on the CTO role, hiring and AI at vaughndickson.com/writing, and open-source side projects at GitHub.