Semiotic.AI - Chief Technology Officer (CTO) — AI-to-AI Micropayments

Semiotic.AI is advancing the frontier of decentralized systems by designing and implementing foundational infrastructure for cryptographically‑secure and autonomous agent interaction. Having contributed significantly to protocol R&D in the Graph ecosystem, we are now initiating a novel micropayments solution that enables financial AI‑to‑AI and AI‑to‑Service interactions, with minimal latency and high scalability.

This new protocol will serve as a payment substrate for autonomous agents, enabling granular, per‑interaction value exchange across services, data feeds, and coordination layers. We believe that unlocking frictionless micro‑transactions between intelligent agents is a prerequisite for the next evolution of economic coordination, and we’re assembling the team who is going to make it happen.

We’re seeking a technically seasoned, strategically‑minded CTO to lead this endeavour, someone who can bridge the rigour of systems architecture with the flexibility and pace of early‑stage product development. Think: agents paying to query a subgraph, trigger a smart contract, or use compute. Think: embedded wallets, real‑time payments and cryptographic receipts, all abstracted away in an invisible, seamless UX.

The Mission

As the CTO of this initiative, you will design and steward the technical foundation for a machine‑native payments layer. You'll architect systems, define standards, mentor contributors, and ensure that every engineering decision aligns with our broader strategic direction. That of enabling trust‑minimized, low‑cost, composable agent‑to‑agent commerce in both Web3 and Web2 environments. This is a deeply cross‑disciplinary challenge, requiring fluency in Distributed Systems, On‑Chain Logic, Cryptographic design, protocol scalability, and payments architecture.

Your Areas of Play

Technical Architecture & Protocol Design

• Define the system‑level architecture for agent‑centric payments, including state channels, settlement layer, agent identity and reputation, wallet layers, plus on/off‑ramping solutions.
• Translate cryptographic and academic research into secure, performant, and modular protocol components.
• Standardize a framework for agent‑to‑agent and agent‑to‑service payments, supporting high throughput, privacy, and cost‑efficiency.
• Lead or advise in the implementation of PoC agents, which can include DeFi data consumers and service access agents.
• Define payment flow primitives that support machine coordination, access control, and service gating across decentralized infrastructure.

Strategic Leadership & Roadmapping

• Define and own the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for the micropayments protocol.
• Co‑develop the technical roadmap with the CEO, Head of Research and Cryptography team.
• Define and prioritise development phases: from concept, prototype, MVP and final product.
• Balance rapid product iterations with long‑term scalability and integration viability.
• Translate research and early‑stage concepts into working protocols, interfaces, and dev infrastructure.
• Partner with the CEO and Research team to synthesize market opportunity, technical constraints, and user needs into a coherent product vision.

Team Leadership & Engineering Culture

• Serve as an internal thought leader and external evangelist.
• Establish robust processes for code quality, dev tooling, review, and testing.
• Shape the technical team structure; hire, mentor, and align contributors with clearly defined technical goals.
• Define and uphold standards for quality, velocity, and engineering excellence, fostering a strong culture of technical ownership, experimentation, and delivery.

Ecosystem & Fundraising Support

• Represent Semiotic.AI in research circles, dev conferences, and protocol working groups.
• Support fundraising through technical diligence, roadmap presentation, and investor communication.
• Coordinate conversations with integration partners, infra providers, and agent protocol developers.
• Become the Subject Matter Expert on product Architecture.

Requirements

• 7+ years of experience building distributed systems, ideally with a focus on scalability, protocol engineering, or financial infrastructure.
• Comfort with bridging the gap between research and implementation, taking ideas from whitepapers to running systems.
• Technical leadership in early‑stage environments, preferably within Web3, fintech, or systems infrastructure.
• Strong proficiency in Rust or Go, with working knowledge of smart contract development and on‑chain execution, ideally in Solidity.
• Familiarity with agent‑based orchestration frameworks, coordination economies, or embedded AI tools.
• Previous experience building payment protocols or protocol abstraction services.
• Strong grasp of payment flow architecture, including on‑chain/off‑chain interactions, cryptographic commitments, state channel design, and wallet infrastructure.
• Clear and rigorous communicator; able to guide architectural decisions, explain tradeoffs, and pitch technical visions across stakeholder groups.

Differentiators

• Experience with AI x crypto hybrid systems or agent coordination in real‑time data networks.
• Experience with traditional payment systems (e.g. SWIFT, SEPA, ACH, Fedwire, Visa/Mastercard, Stripe, Plaid, Open Banking APIs).
• Familiarity with on‑chain payment rails (e.g. Ethereum, L2s like zkSync/Starknet, Solana Pay, Cosmos IBC, LayerZero, Axelar).
• Understanding of EOAs and Account Abstraction developments like EIP‑7702.
• Awareness of protocol‑level enhancements like the PAY opcode (EIP‑5920) for native ETH transfers.
• Experience bridging fiat and crypto flows, including on/off‑ramps, stablecoins (USDC, DAI), and compliance layers (KYC, AML).

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