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 prioritize 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.

• 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).