San Francisco, CA · On-site (5 days) · Full-time
Compensation: $225,000–$300,000 + 0%–3% equity
A San Francisco–based, seed-stage AI startup helping enterprises move AI from prototype to reliable production — embedding with customers, auditing their operations, and building the agents, integrations, and workflows that transform how those businesses run. The founding thesis: the hardest part of enterprise AI isn’t the model, it’s deployment, reliability, and trust.
Founded 2026 · 11–50 people · Industry: AI Tools
Lead the platform’s technical direction — design the architecture, set engineering standards, and own the build-vs-buy decisions that determine the company’s trajectory. This is the person defining the system, not a senior IC inside someone else’s org. Direct path to CTO.
What you’ll be doing
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Own the technical architecture: agent orchestration, process-mining infrastructure, diagnostic pipelines, and the control plane that turns audit outputs into deployed AI systems
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Architect compound AI systems running inside Fortune 5000 environments: multi-step agents, retrieval pipelines, evaluation frameworks, human-in-the-loop governance
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Set the engineering pace — the company ships to production weekly, not quarterly; drive velocity, cut scope ruthlessly
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Recruit, mentor, and lead engineers; set code-review standards, establish process, and build a team that scales from 5 to 50
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Bridge research and production: stay current on foundation models, agent frameworks, inference optimization, tool use, and long-context reasoning, and translate what’s useful into production
Tech stack: Agent orchestration, retrieval pipelines, evaluation frameworks; infrastructure depth (Kubernetes, distributed systems, cloud) a plus.
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Production AI/ML systems: inference, orchestration, evaluation, monitoring
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High agency, ownership mentality
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SF Financial District, 5 days in-person
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Real, deep understanding of how scale actually works in production.
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Can architect on a whiteboard without leaning on slides.
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Has shipped production systems they personally designed.
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Strong opinions, easily updated when shown they’re wrong.
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Visible curiosity about agent and AI infrastructure specifically.
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Capable of being CTO in a few months
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Title says “staff” but they’ve only ever consumed abstracted infra.
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Can’t code live in the interview.
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Hand-wavy on scalability (“we’d just use Kubernetes”).
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Ego that won’t compress to a 10-person team.
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Coast mode from a comfortable big-tech role.
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No background at a top AI lab or as a founding/senior engineer at an AI-native startup.
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Significantly outside 6+ years engineering with 2+ years in a staff, principal, or founding role (years of experience isn’t a hard filter — recent company quality and demonstrated output matter more).
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Founding-team scope and ownership of the entire technical vision, with a direct path to CTO
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Build a platform, not features — every client deployment compounds the product
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100% production deployment rate with immediate, measurable impact
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Direct access to Fortune 5000 decision-makers
LocationSan Francisco, CA (Financial District)Work policy5 days/week in-personCompensation$225,000–$300,000 + 0%–3% equityVisa sponsorshipNone availableEmployment typeFull-time
