CTO and Chief Systems Architect

You make the hardware, the operating system, the private data, the agent and remote execution behave as one dependable product rather than five that were introduced to each other late.

The work:

Set the architecture and engineering priorities with the founder. Establish one authoritative agent identity and policy domain per person, review tradeoffs in public within the team, and build alongside the engineers. Define which components we create, adopt or develop with partners.

What good looks like:

In your first 90 days, deliver a working reference system, a threat model and a funded delivery plan with named owners and measurable release criteria.

Evidence we look for:

Bring deep systems judgment and evidence that you have shipped complex products across organizational boundaries. Explain a major failure, the evidence that changed your view and the people you helped develop.

Required:

• Deep systems judgement across hardware and software, not depth in one and vocabulary in the other
• You have shipped a complex product across organisational boundaries, where the hard part was the seams
• You can walk through a major failure you owned: the evidence that changed your view and what you did next
• A record of developing engineers who went on to do better work than they could before

Nice to have:

• Operating-system, silicon, or secure-enclave work specifically
• You have set an architecture that survived several years of the product changing under it
• Experience in a regulated or safety-critical domain

The exercise:

Walk through a system you built, then design recovery after the user's primary computer is lost.

How we work:

We work together in the office, five days a week, and you can be based at any of our garages: Kirkland Garage (Kirkland, WA); UAE Garage (Dubai, Dubai). We hire across the United States, India and the UAE. We are remote-friendly around family: if you need to work from home some days to look after the people you love, we arrange that with you one person at a time, and we encourage people to use it rather than tough it out.

Pay:

We publish what we pay. Indicative ranges by market and level are on our compensation page, and they are realistic going market rates rather than headline numbers. Wherever we hire we pay at least the local market rate, and for full-time roles our floor is a living wage, never the statutory minimum. Compensation is reviewed every year and on promotion.

Equity:

Every full-time teammate gets stock options. Four-year vesting with a one-year cliff, sized to role, level and impact, and confirmed in writing at offer. High performers earn refresh grants.

Bonus and commission:

An annual performance bonus tied to clear company and personal goals, indicatively 10 to 20 percent of base for non-sales roles. Customer-facing roles carry on-target earnings, typically a 50/50 split of base and variable, with uncapped commission and accelerators above quota.

Health and peace of mind:

Medical, dental and vision for you and your family, plus life and disability cover. We have chosen the highest plan tier available to us rather than the cheapest one that clears the bar, because the point of this is that you never have to think about it. The specific plan numbers are confirmed in your offer letter.

401(k) with company matching:

A 401(k) with a company match, so the years you spend here compound into something that is yours whatever happens next. The match formula is confirmed in your offer letter.

AI tokens:

A budget of AI tokens of your own, because a company that says you should own your AI cannot be the company that rations it. Use them on the work and on whatever you are curious about.

Gym, and the everyday things:

A gym membership, and a corporate benefits programme with its own app, where you redeem real discounts with a long list of retailers on the ordinary purchases of a life.

Family:

We are remote-friendly around your family, arranged one person at a time, and we would rather you took it than toughed it out.

Referrals:

Refer someone we hire full-time who stays a year and you get $1,000 plus $10,000 in referral stock-based equity, on top of your own package.