Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Chief Technology Officer (CTO) | Los Angeles (Hybrid) | Founder-Level Equity + Strong Base

My client, a very well-funded private company with strong runway, is disrupting a huge market by building the missing layer of enterprise AI: a system that ingests live data from complex physical operations, understands what actually matters, and drives decisions and workflows across the people responsible for the outcome. Not a dashboard, not a copilot, a platform that closes the loop between what's happening on the ground and what the organisation does about it. They've deliberately started in one of the hardest asset-intensive sectors, where the data is messy and the commercial stakes are enormous, because solving that first creates the most defensible foundation to expand into every industry where physical operations and business decisions need to move together.

The company is led by two experienced operators: a CEO who previously led digital transformation at one of the world's largest automotive manufacturers, and a COO with a track record across two of the most recognised names in global technology. Both are commercial rather than technical founders, which is exactly why this seat matters: you won't be the second technical opinion in the room, you'll be the first and final one. They want a genuine partner to own the entire technical vision and build alongside them from the ground up.

They're already trusted by a major enterprise operator for a live production deployment across multiple international sites, real commercial proof, not a demo!

As their CTO, this is a builder-leader role in the truest sense. The founding engineering team is hired and in place, but no significant architectural decisions have been locked in, so the architecture, engineering standards and technical culture are yours to shape. You'll make the hard architectural calls and write critical parts of the system yourself: production-grade ingestion across heterogeneous industrial data sources, the first end-to-end detect-decide-act loop in a live environment, and the orchestration layer connecting model outputs to real operational workflows. You'll also own the technical narrative with customers and investors and hire the next layer of the team.

What we need to see:

• 10+ years in software engineering, including senior technical leadership at a venture-backed company
• Prior founding-team or early-stage CTO experience (this isn't a first startup leadership role)
• Built and scaled high-performing engineering teams without lowering the hiring bar
• Shipped production AI/ML at scale, ideally real-time or streaming pipelines where model outputs drive actions
• Hands-on depth in Python and event-driven systems, strong AWS or GCP

Bonus, not required: exposure to industrial or operational environments, sensor data, edge, SCADA or industrial protocols. Deep AI capability matters more than domain background.

Note: This role is hybrid with 2-3 days per week in office, LA preferred, with periodic international travel to operational sites (roughly quarterly)