Open role
[Remote] Founding CTO - AI Engineering
Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Axial Search is collaborating with a seed-stage AI company to fill a senior technical leadership role. The Founding CTO will drive the company's AI technical strategy and lead the development of AI capabilities while actively participating in investor conversations and the seed raise process.
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
Skills
- 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
- Founder-level ownership mentality, with appetite for meaningful equity and seed-stage risk
- 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
Company Overview