Chief Technology Officer

Chief Technology Officer: AI Research Company (Stealth) A cherry portfolio company Location: UK or US preferred; international candidates considered Reports to: Founder & CEO Compensation: Competitive executive package, including equity About the company We're an early-stage AI research and technology company building foundational intelligence for complex, high-stakes decision-making. Our research goes beyond large language models towards artificial judgement: systems that can understand complex environments, reason across disciplines, form strategies and act on them. That core intelligence powers three applications: enterprise (B2B), regulated legal and consumer. Each has its own demands for scale, security and governance. The role We're looking for a CTO to own the technology strategy, architecture and infrastructure behind the group. This is a senior, highly technical role. You'll work alongside the Founder & CEO and the Chief Scientist, and lead the VP Engineering, who owns day-to-day delivery. What you'll own - Technology strategy: Set the long-term architecture and investment roadmap across all three businesses, and advise the CEO on major technical decisions and risks. - Architecture and infrastructure: Design shared, scalable infrastructure covering cloud, hybrid, sovereign and on-prem, multi-tenancy, data isolation and regional deployment. - AI infrastructure: Partner with the Chief Scientist to turn research breakthroughs into production systems, including proprietary models, knowledge graphs and autonomous capabilities. - Security and governance: Own group-wide standards for security, resilience and compliance, to the level that major enterprises, governments and regulated industries expect. - Engineering leadership: Hire, mentor and oversee the VP Engineering, and build an organisation that can scale quickly. - Technology economics: Manage cloud, compute and inference costs, make build-versus-buy calls, and choose infrastructure partners. - Executive leadership: Contribute to company strategy, fundraising and board discussions, and represent the company to partners, customers and investors. What you'll bring - Senior technology leadership in a high-growth tech company - Deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure and large-scale platform design - A strong grasp of modern AI infrastructure and what it takes to deploy advanced AI in production - Experience running shared platforms that serve several products or customer environments - A track record of leading senior engineering leaders and building high-performing teams - Strong commercial judgement on technology economics and capital allocation Nice to have - Experience at a frontier AI lab, a global tech company or a scaling enterprise software business - Infrastructure work on foundation models or autonomous agents - Experience across both B2B and B2C, or in regulated sectors such as finance, legal, government or defence - Experience scaling a company from early stage to international operations Who you are You're a strong technologist and a strategic builder. You can make architecture decisions that will shape the company for the next decade, and you're commercially sharp. You're a true partner to the founder, comfortable challenging and advising. You lead leaders, and you work with high trust, low ego, rigour and pace. Why join You'll lay the technical foundations of a company opening a new frontier in AI, with real ownership from day one and the chance to bring advanced intelligence into high-stakes, real-world settings. If you need it even shorter, the "Nice to have" and "Who you are" sections are the easiest to cut.