Co-Founder & CTO

About the Role

General Creative is seeking an exceptional technical co-founder and CTO to own research strategy, product development, and team building. You'll join as an equal founder with ~28% equity, working full-time to build a proprietary training and evaluation platform for creative AI on top of a live product already generating valuable data. This is a rare opportunity to shape technical vision and company direction from the ground up, not a conventional CTO hire.

What You'll Do

• Own technical and research strategy, from current workflows to a proprietary training and evaluation platform for creative agents.
• Build data infrastructure connecting briefs, submissions, generation traces, decisions, critique, and campaign outcomes.
• Design systems that evaluate, rank, critique, generate, and improve creative work.
• Develop the allocation policy that directs campaign budget (and simultaneously shapes dataset collection).
• Make core decisions on frontier models, fine-tuning, post-training, RL, and original research directions.
• Build reliable infrastructure for creator workflows, brand campaigns, experimentation, training, and inference.
• Set standards for data quality, consent, privacy, measurement, and model evaluation.
• Recruit and lead the first engineering and research team.
• Work directly with creators, brands, and investors.

What We’re Looking For

• Hands-on experience building preference or reward models (RLHF, reward modeling, ranking subjective outputs, evaluation systems).
• Comfort with causal inference on observational data: selection bias, off-policy evaluation, adaptive experimentation, or validating proxies against delayed outcomes.
• Shipped real products used by people; research alone is not sufficient.
• Ready to commit full-time (6-7 days per week) as an equal co-founder with early-stage uncertainty.
• Experience at a frontier AI lab or research organization of similar calibre is a strong signal.
• Production ML at scale: bandits, sequential allocation, online experimentation, or ads/marketplace/recommender systems tied to business outcomes.
• Multimodal generation, agents, planning systems, or latent-variable modeling experience valued.
• Track record recruiting strong technical talent and owning programs end-to-end.
• High agency, intellectual honesty, low ego, and genuine interest in creativity and human feedback.

Compensation & Benefits

• Equity: ~28% as equal co-founder
• Cash compensation: Discussed directly based on circumstances and fit
• Location: In-person, San Francisco

Location

In-person, San Francisco.