About this Chief Product & Technology Officer (CPTO) role at Workana
Workana · Remote, LATAM · Reports to Tomás O'Farrell (CEO)
The Opportunity
We are reinventing Workana, and we’re looking for the person who will lead Product and Technology to build the next version of our platform, with a dedicated Product and Development team to make it happen.
Workana connects companies with top talent across Latin America, from individual specialists to cross-functional teams and outcome-based projects. More than 2 million professionals join Workana every year, and over 500,000 companies have hired through the platform. Every placement helps a company scale faster and opens a new career path for someone talented.
This is a hands-on builder role. You’ll define what we build and why, and you’ll get into the details yourself: prototyping, discussing architecture and code with the team, and using the product every day, so you always know what’s working, what isn’t, and what we should try next.
The objective is simple and ambitious: help companies and talent navigate the biggest shift in work in decades. AI is automating tasks, but most work isn’t disappearing, it’s being redesigned. Great talent is no longer the one who executes a task well, but the one who understands the problem, redesigns the workflow and owns the result. We want Workana to be where companies find that talent, and where talent becomes it.
Where Do You Shine?
This is the most important part of the role.
Truly AI-native
AI has completely changed the way you work: how you research, prototype, decide and build. Your week today looks nothing like it did two years ago, and you can show us exactly why. And you know how to bring that into the product: you design experiences where AI does the work for the user, not just another feature in the menu.
Product judgment
You live and breathe what makes a product great and what doesn't. We take the process (UX, PRDs, discovery) for granted; what we're looking for is taste and genuine curiosity. You can tell us why a product you used this year truly surprised you, and you understand the dynamics of a two-sided marketplace: trust, match quality and recurrence.
Ship, learn, iterate
You turn ideas into working product in days, not months. You launch, measure what happened and iterate fast, and you know that with AI the gap between an idea and production keeps shrinking. Speed never comes at the cost of quality: you build the habits and systems that let the team do both.
Leadership and storytelling
A great vision is worthless if it doesn't spread. You know how to align engineering, business and operations behind the same idea, and get everyone pushing in the same direction.
If these four areas are not where you have personally delivered strong results, this probably isn't the right role for you.
What You'll Build
AI is redesigning work, and our freelancers' work is no exception. To lead that shift, we start from something no one else has: ten years of real work across Latin America, with more than 11 million profiles and around 25K projects posted every month. Today we barely use that data.
Your job is to turn it into Workana Intelligence, an intelligence layer that understands both sides:
- For clients: stop buying a catalog of profiles and start buying outcomes. Understand their business problem, design the mix of AI and talent that best solves it, and orchestrate the delivery.
- For talent: know who truly delivers, beyond their skills, and give each person the opportunities, validation and training that help them grow.
What You'll Do
- Define the product and technology vision and strategy, and turn them into a roadmap built on a few high-impact bets.
- Build the machine that turns ideas into production: a team and a way of working that ship fast and with high quality, using AI to shorten every step from idea to deploy.
- Be the voice of our users in every decision: what frustrates them, what they love, and what they don’t yet know they need. And make sure that insight shows up in the product in weeks, not quarters.
- Decide what gets built, what doesn’t, and to what level of finish. Saying no to a bad idea is easy; the real work is saying no to a good idea that arrived at the wrong time.
- Launch, measure and iterate: put things in users’ hands early, learn from what happens and adjust fast.
- Build a team that talented people want to join and grow in, and own the platform: architecture, quality, security and costs.
Requirements
Who You Are
- 8+ years in product and/or technology, with at least 4 leading teams and developing leaders, without ever stepping away from the details.
- You've launched a new product from zero to one, not just optimized an existing one.
- Strong technical background: you can sit down with developers and discuss architecture, data and trade-offs as a peer, and the team trusts your judgment on how to build, not just what to build.
- You've taken AI to production, with real users.
- Experience in marketplaces, digital platforms or SaaS at scale, ideally in data-driven products (matching, recommendations, search).
- Fluent Spanish and advanced English.
- Experience in the freelance or future-of-work space.
- Experience at a startup or scale-up in LATAM or the US.
- Portuguese: Brazil is one of our most important markets.
Benefits
What We Offer
- The chance to build the next version of Workana, on top of ten years of real work data, with real autonomy to bet big.
- Product and Development report to you: you define the roadmap, the architecture, who we hire and high-impact investment decisions.
- Direct access to the CEO and the leadership team.
- A lot of freedom in how you work, with a clear expectation of full commitment to Workana.
- Competitive compensation for the level of the role, plus remote work.
How Success Is Measured
The ultimate measure is recurrence: companies and talent that keep coming back to Workana because the product understands what they need. Changing that takes time, so we look at three stages:
Shipping: in the first months, the team ships faster and with higher quality, and the first bets of the new roadmap are in users' hands.
Adoption: clients and talent use what we build, and it shows in better matches, faster hiring and fewer drop-offs along the way.
Recurrence: more one-off clients become recurring relationships, and more talent keeps working with the same clients. This is the number that matters most.
In your first weeks we'll establish the current baseline together, and you'll build a 12-month plan with concrete milestones, the product metrics the role will own and the hiring plan for your team. We'll review it every quarter and adjust it as we learn.