Founding CTO - AI Engineering

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the company’s AI technical strategy across product development, implementation and deployment.
• Own the technical narrative in investor conversations, particularly around AI strategy, defensibility and execution.
• Own hands-on development of AI capabilities across early product builds, pilots and production systems.
• Make practical decisions on model selection, LLM tooling, fine-tuning, orchestration and related AI engineering approaches.
• Build and improve AI systems that create persistent organizational intelligence over time.
• Develop approaches for evaluating AI system performance, reliability and output quality.
• Establish strong practices around guardrails, testing, monitoring and continuous improvement.
• Recruit, lead and develop a small team of engineers as the company scales.
• Drive engineering velocity in a lean seed-stage environment where priorities shift quickly.

Candidate Requirements

• Deep technical expertise in AI, machine learning, neural networks and modern generative AI systems.
• Hands-on experience building with large language models in commercial or production environments.
• Experience with fine-tuning, LLM tooling, agentic systems, orchestration or related applied AI techniques.
• Strong coding ability, with willingness to remain deeply involved in technical execution.
• Startup experience strongly preferred, especially zero-to-one or early product buildout experience.
• Experience in a high-growth software company also highly relevant.
• Prior fundraising exposure strongly preferred, with the ability to credibly own the technical narrative in front of VCs.
• Founder-level ownership mentality, with appetite for meaningful equity and seed-stage risk.