Founding CTO

Job Title: Founding CTO

Location: Remote

Salary: $180,000-$250,000

Skills: Conversational AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), AI/ML Architecture, Cloud Infrastructure, Product Engineering

About the Software Development Company / The Opportunity:

Join a trailblazing organization in the software development industry dedicated to transforming the future of conversational intelligence and adaptive AI systems. This high-impact opportunity allows you to be the technical co-founder, defining the roadmap and leadership for a product-driven early-stage AI startup. Leverage cutting-edge technologies and partner directly with visionary founders to develop emotionally intelligent, user-centric AI solutions that will shape next-generation communication and coaching experiences.

Responsibilities:

• Define and execute the overall technical vision, architecture, and engineering strategy for the AI platform.
• Design and build scalable conversational AI systems, supporting infrastructure, and custom application layers atop large language models.
• Make critical architectural decisions on model usage, orchestration frameworks, APIs, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure.
• Evaluate build-vs-buy choices concerning AI tooling, infrastructure components, and platform capabilities.
• Lead product development cycles from early prototype to scalable, production-ready systems.
• Partner closely with the founding team to influence product direction, user experience, and strategic roadmap.
• Establish engineering best practices, technical standards, and a high-performing engineering culture.
• Ensure platform scalability, security, reliability, and stay attuned to trends in AI and adaptive personal technology.

Must-Have Skills:

• Demonstrated experience building and launching conversational AI, agentic workflows, or adaptive AI products.
• Deep knowledge of large language models, foundation model ecosystems, and AI product architecture.
• Full-stack technical leadership spanning backend infrastructure, cloud environments, APIs, and AI/ML engineering.
• Ability to lead development from prototype to large-scale production systems in a fast-moving startup environment.
• Hands-on experience with architecting and building proprietary AI systems, not just third-party integrations.
• Entrepreneurial mindset, high ownership, and proven team leadership or engineering management capabilities.
• Strategic technical decision-making in ambiguous, dynamic, and high-growth settings.

Nice-to-Have Skills:

• Prior CTO or technical co-founder experience in an early-stage startup.
• Background in consumer-facing AI products or platforms in behavioral, coaching, or communication domains.
• Experience designing conversational UX, memory systems, recommendation engines, or emotionally intelligent AI solutions.
• Familiarity with AI orchestration frameworks, vector databases, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and agent architectures.
• Track record in industries such as healthcare, wellness, coaching, or other communication-focused platforms.