About
Florida CTO is the practice of Randy Staats, a technology executive who has spent twenty-five years leading engineering, product, data, security, and cloud organizations, and who never stopped building.
The track record
Owned technology end to end across multiple companies, from platform and architecture to security and budget, while scaling the organization across divisions, departments, and teams. Partnered directly with CEOs and boards on the roadmap the business ran on.
Executive team member at a fast-growing insurance SaaS company. Ran engineering, product, data, infrastructure, security, and compliance, with a platform that held 99.99% uptime.
Led cross-functional engineering, data, QA, and delivery teams for a SaaS company, and sponsored the OKR adoption that tied engineering work to business outcomes.
Built a small data team into a globally distributed organization for a multi-brand media company, with a modern data stack, MDM, governance, and analytics that cut ad hoc reporting 90%.
Also carried along the way: security officer and compliance ownership, IT operations, regulated environments, vendor and budget management.
Why this practice exists
Every growing company hits decisions that call for CTO-level judgment: which platform, which architecture, which hires, where AI genuinely pays off and where it's noise. And as building gets technically easier, that judgment becomes the scarce part of the job, understanding the customer, the product, and the value well enough to know what should be built, not just what can be.
That kind of judgment comes from range. Twenty-five years across companies large and small, stacks of every vintage, and product, data, and engineering organizations seen from the inside, carrying the consequences of the calls personally. How we work together follows from there, whether fractional, advisory, interim, or alongside the technology leaders already in the seat.
The other half is that advice alone rarely changes anything. So I keep a delivery arm: EmbarkDev, our custom development and delivery studio, builds the platforms, automations, and modernizations the strategy calls for, so the direction I set gets shipped.
Based in Sarasota, Florida. Working with companies anywhere.
