Founding CTO

Founding CTO — Diana (Paris)

Company Description:

Diana is sovereign AI for Europe's regulated industries — fintech, insurtech, legaltech, healthtech, and the public sector. Where public AI tools require sending data to an external provider, Diana runs entirely inside the client's own infrastructure or a sovereign EU cloud. Data never leaves the network, is never sent to a third-party model, and is never used for training — so there is zero data egress and compliance is by design with GDPR, DORA, NIS2, and the EU AI Act. Privacy isn't a policy; it's the architecture. By bringing AI to the data instead of the data to the AI, Diana lets regulated organizations use advanced AI — asking questions, searching internal documents, and running specialist agents — on their most sensitive work, without it ever leaving their control.

Role Description As Founding CTO and technical co-founder, you'll own Diana's technology end to end: architecture, security, and execution. Based in Paris (on-site), you'll take an advanced MVP — a real, with working multi-agent orchestration, fully local LLM inference, and code-enforced sovereignty — and turn it into hardened, enterprise-grade infrastructure that banks and insurers can trust. You'll set the architecture and technical roadmap, lead the refactor of the core platform into maintainable, well-tested services, and personally own the security posture — activating and validating data protections and carrying the technical side of CISO and enterprise security reviews. You'll build the production delivery and deployment story (CI/CD, Kubernetes/IaC, HA, DR, observability, repeatable on-prem installs), own the local inference and RAG stack, and hire and lead the founding engineering team. As co-founder, you'll partner closely with the CEO on strategy, due diligence, and customer and investor conversations.

Qualifications

• Senior/staff-level engineer who has built and scaled production Python distributed backends (async, microservices).
• Real depth in security engineering — you think like an attacker and can earn a CISO's trust.
• Strong infrastructure/platform skills: Kubernetes, IaC, HA/DR, observability, release engineering; on-prem or air-gapped deployment experience a major plus.
• Hands-on experience running LLM inference and RAG in production (self-hosted/local especially valued).
• Proven ability to refactor large, live codebases safely, without breaking the product.
• Solid understanding of EU data-protection and compliance frameworks (GDPR, DORA, NIS2, EU AI Act).
• Experience building and leading engineering teams in early-stage or high-growth environments, with supportive, inclusive leadership.
• Comfortable as a hands-on technical leader who still writes the hardest code — thriving in an advanced-but-rough codebase and early-stage ambiguity.
• Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.

Compensation

This is an equity-based founding role. Don't expect a salary at the start, you're joining in the founding team for meaningful ownership and upside, with cash compensation introduced as we raise. If that trade-off excites you rather than worries you, we should talk.