Chief Technology Officer

Job Description CTO — Imperative AI Pre-Seed, AI Model Control and AI Performance Improvement Platform Imperative AI is ready to launch “The Pluginless, Effortless Control Tower for AI Models, Agents, and Systems.” Imperative is building a platform designed to give enterprises complete AI control, significantly improved AI performance, full maintenance visibility, and measurable business impact across their AI environments. Give Imperative read-only access to a customer’s cloud environment and the platform automatically discovers AI models, agents, endpoints, and available telemetry. It then begins measuring behavior, analyzing performance, identifying root causes, calculating business impact and trend scores, and delivering actionable solutions for performance improvement and maintenance. Deploy nothing. Change nothing. See everything. No agent. No SDK. No code. No plugin. No application changes. No software installation. Imperative connects to the customer’s cloud environment and can begin delivering visibility, control, and performance improvement with less than 15 minutes of customer effort. NVIDIA Inception Imperative is part of the exclusive NVIDIA Inception Program , providing the company with access to NVIDIA’s broader AI ecosystem and resources as it advances its AI technology platform. The CTO Opportunity – Initially Paid with Generous Stock Options until Pre-Seed funding has been established (should be shortly). We are now looking for an exceptional Chief Technology Officer to lead Imperative through the final stages of product development, technical refinement, AI model and agent training, pre-seed financing support, customer development partnerships, commercialization, and scale. This is not a traditional corporate CTO position. We are looking for a deeply experienced, highly technical startup technology leader who thrives in the earliest and most demanding stages of building a technology company — someone who can personally get into the architecture, code, AI systems, models, agents, telemetry, cloud infrastructure, product, and engineering organization and help take Imperative from its current stage to a production-ready, enterprise-grade platform. The immediate mandate is clear: Finish it. Fine-tune it. Train it. Validate it. Deploy it. Scale it. The CTO will work closely with the founders to put the finishing touches on the Imperative Performance AI technology and prepare it for enterprise deployment. What the CTO Will Lead The CTO will have primary technical responsibility for: Completing and fine-tuning the Imperative Performance AI product and Impertive platform. Reviewing and improving the existing architecture and technical infrastructure. Completing the Performance AI platform and preparing it for commercialization. Training, testing, validating, and optimizing Performance AI’s agents. Leveraging NVIDIA’s AI ecosystem and available NVIDIA technologies and resources. Training models and AI capabilities using the appropriate NVIDIA AI agent technologies, including the available NVIDIA agent ecosystem. Improving model performance, accuracy, reliability, responsiveness, and consistency. Validating Imperative’s AI performance monitoring, drift detection, technology monitoring, resource monitoring, root-cause analysis, business-impact analysis, and actionable recommendations. Ensuring the platform can operate effectively across enterprise cloud environments. Execute the pluginless, effortless, agentless, SDK-free, code-free architecture and customer deployment model. Must be really good with Open Telemetry. Ensuring Imperative can securely obtain and analyze available telemetry through read-only access to customer cloud environments. Completing the technical integrations and infrastructure required for enterprise customer deployment. Establishing the technical standards, development processes, testing methodologies, security practices, and deployment processes necessary for commercialization. Leading technical troubleshooting and resolving remaining product, infrastructure, AI, and engineering issues. Working directly with prospective customer development partners to understand technical requirements and rapidly incorporate validated requirements into the platform. Preparing the technology organization for the transition from pre-seed development to commercial scale. The Development Team The ideal CTO candidate will already have — or have exceptionally strong relationships with — an experienced development team capable of working closely with the CTO during this critical final development phase. The development team will also work for options during this short sprint until the product is finished and funded. We are looking for a CTO who can bring technical horsepower to the company and work directly with a highly capable team to get the product across the finish line. The CTO and development team should be comfortable operating with speed, urgency, and limited resources. Who We’re Looking For The ideal candidate will bring: Significant CTO, VP Engineering, founding engineer, and experience in a startup environment. Experience building and launching cloud, AI, enterprise infrastructure, cybersecurity, observability, AI operations, and related technology platforms. Demonstrated experience taking a technology platform from development through production and commercialization. Deep hands-on experience with AI/ML systems, LLMs, AI agents, model training, inference environments, AI infrastructure, and enterprise AI architectures. Strong experience with cloud infrastructure, particularly AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform . Working knowledge of GitHub, APIs, OpenTelemetry, cloud services, inference infrastructure, data pipelines, model monitoring, and enterprise application architectures. Experience designing systems that operate across complex enterprise technology environments. Experience with AI model performance, model behavior, model drift, hallucination detection, latency, resource utilization, reliability, and related AI performance measurements. The ability to personally diagnose technical problems and make architecture and engineering decisions rather than simply delegating them. Experience with AI agents and multi-agent architectures. Experience training, fine-tuning, testing, and validating AI models and agents. Strong technical leadership and the ability to establish high standards for engineering quality, accountability, testing, documentation, and execution. The ability to communicate effectively with technical founders, engineers, enterprise CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, AI leaders, investors, boards, strategic partners, and customers. A highly dynamic, hands-on leadership style. The ability to move extremely quickly from problem identification to technical solution. A willingness to personally get into the technology when necessary. Exceptional judgment, creativity, adaptability, persistence, and execution. High personal standards for integrity, ownership, preparation, accountability, and results. What Makes This Opportunity Different This is an opportunity to join Imperative at an unusually important point in its development. The core concept and Performance AI product are almost done. The next phase is about finishing, validating, training, commercializing, and scaling the technology. The CTO will have a significant opportunity to shape: The final product architecture. AI model and agent performance. AI training and optimization. Technical product strategy. Engineering culture. Development methodology. Cloud architecture. Enterprise deployment architecture. Security architecture. Scalability. Technical roadmap. AI agent capabilities. Product-market fit from a technical perspective. The company’s long-term technology organization. This is an opportunity for a CTO who wants to build something rather than simply maintain something that already exists. Where We Are Imperative is currently approaching its pre-seed financing round . The CTO will work closely with the founders, board, advisors, and business leadership to help convert the existing technology into a production-ready and commercially scalable platform. The Leadership Profile The CTO who finishes what others started. We are looking for an exceptional technical leader who is an unusually effective executor, builder, problem solver, and company builder. Someone who doesn’t simply manage engineers — they understand the technology deeply enough to lead them. Someone who is comfortable opening the codebase, reviewing architecture, analyzing AI behavior, debugging difficult problems, making technical decisions, training models, working with developers, talking with customers, and making whatever technical decisions are necessary to move the company forward. Someone who thrives in an environment where: Speed matters. Execution matters. Technical judgment matters. Ownership matters. Results matter. For the right person, this is an opportunity to join an ambitious AI company at the stage when some of the most important technical decisions are still being shaped — and to have a direct role in building the technology that becomes the foundation of the company. Compensation Initially, the position will be compensated primarily through generous stock options until the next round of financing has been secured. The goal is to move quickly through the pre-seed financing and transition the organization toward funded, fully compensated technical and engineering roles. Imperative AI The Pluginless, Effortless “Control Tower” for AI Models, Agents, and Systems. Deploy nothing. Change nothing. See everything. NVIDIA Inception Program Member Imperative is building the control layer for the rapidly expanding enterprise AI ecosystem — providing visibility, performance intelligence, behavioral monitoring, root-cause analysis, business-impact analysis, and actionable solutions without requiring customers to significantly modify their existing AI applications. This is an opportunity to help finish building it.