Chief Technology Officer

*Charlotte, NC or Washington, D.C. | Full-time | U.S. citizenship required, with eligibility for a Top Secret clearance.*

What We Build

Decision-grade AI for national security. Most AI is answer-grade — fast, fluent, unaccountable. Fine for a chat window. Useless in a command post, where the question isn't "what's the answer" but "what would have to be true for this to be wrong," and where a confident wrong answer costs something real.

So we build the other thing. Agentic decision support with deterministic workflows, hard data guardrails, and analytic integrity that survives contact with people trained to attack an assessment. Competing hypotheses, not a single confident narrative. Graduated authority that knows the difference between advising an analyst and orchestrating an action. Model-agnostic by design — we use frontier intelligence, we don't depend on frontier knowledge.

Kubernetes-native, cloud to disconnected edge.

The interesting problems here aren't the ones the industry is working on. Everyone is racing to make models sound more certain. We're building the system that makes certainty earn its place — where the interface itself forces the analyst to commit before the machine reveals, where nothing leaves the platform without passing an integrity gate, where the agent's job is sometimes to slow you down. That's a design philosophy with real engineering underneath it, and almost nobody is doing it.

We build fast, and we ship into environments that don't forgive.

The Role

You will lead the technology roadmap while rolling up your sleeves to write code during all-hands-on-deck moments. You are our senior-most technologist and our most credible technical voice in the market. You report to the CEO and you sit on the executive team.

You will be in the codebase. We're AI-native — everyone here builds, and the CTO more so, because technical judgment decays the moment you stop touching the system. Architecture, review, real commits.

You will also be the technical face of this company. Customer technical walkthroughs, partner architecture reviews, conference stages, podcasts, and the second- and third-tier conversations where interest becomes procurement. You'll move from a program office to an engineering deep-dive in the same afternoon and feel at home in both.

What You'll Own

• Technical vision and architecture: long-range direction of the platform — model orchestration, agentic workflow design, data guardrails, and evaluation.
• Hands-on engineering: direct contribution to the core platform, architectural spikes, and the hardest technical problems.
• The full SDLC and security: secure development lifecycle, supply chain integrity, STIG compliance, and ATO pathways into government boundaries.
• Deployment leadership: deployment into GovCloud, air-gapped, and disconnected edge environments.
• Customer-facing leadership: owning technical relationships with mission customers and prime partners, and writing and defending technical volumes.

About You

You have 10+ years as a software engineer and you rolled into the AI era with ease. You build with these tools daily and you have opinions about where they break, so joining a firm that works this way is no adjustment.

You've deployed real enterprise software into real customer environments. You think in full lifecycle: security posture, architecture at the client endpoint, environmental constraints, sustainment. You know the difference between a demo and a system somebody depends on.

You've done client-facing work, you're good at it, and you want more of it. Conferences, podcasts, panels, executive briefings: you can hold a technical conversation and a business conversation in the same room without losing either audience.

You're precise about claims. You don't sell what the code can't do. You operate without scaffolding: we set direction and expect ownership, and nobody here is assigned work.

Compensation

• Base salary commensurate with market and experience
• Equity
• Medical, vision, and dental insurance

Location & travel

• Based in Charlotte, NC or Washington, D.C.
• Currently remote, moving to hybrid as company needs change
• 25–35% travel to customer sites, partner facilities, and the industry calendar

Requirements

• 10+ years professional software engineering
• Currently hands-on, with a strong background in writing and reviewing code
• Production experience with LLM-based systems: orchestration, evaluation, retrieval, guardrails
• Deep expertise in cloud-native architecture (Kubernetes, microservices, CI/CD)
• Experience with secure SDLC, threat modeling, and government compliance frameworks
• Ability to lead senior executive and government-level technical discussions
• U.S. citizenship and eligibility for a Top Secret clearance

Preferred

• Active TS/SCI
• AWS GovCloud experience (IL4/5/6)
• Prior military or Intelligence Community service

Hiring process

Share something you built — a repository, an architecture, or a technical talk

Share a short note on the hardest end-to-end deployment you have owned