Chief Technology & Product Officer

About the role
Agentic Defense Solutions, Inc. is seeking a Chief Technology & Product Officer (CTO/CPO) to own the technical and product direction of the company as we build the operational trust layer for AI in high-consequence environments.

This is not a traditional executive role where product strategy and engineering execution are delegated several layers down. We are looking for a deeply technical product and engineering leader who can move comfortably between company strategy, product architecture, customer problems, engineering execution, and the code when necessary.

You will own the evolution of the ARIA product family: defining what we build, why we build it, how the platform is architected, and how our engineering organization delivers it.

The central technical challenge is significant. AI systems are rapidly moving from generating information to reasoning, making decisions, invoking tools, and executing actions. In mission-critical environments, those systems need a control plane that determines what AI can do, how it reasons, which data and tools it can access, when humans must intervene, and how every consequential action can be reconstructed and defended.

That is what we are building.

You will work directly with the CEO and founding team to turn that vision into a category-defining product and technical platform.

What you'll do
Product Strategy & Direction

• Own product strategy and roadmap across the ARIA product family, translating the company's mission and market opportunity into a coherent product portfolio.
• Develop a deep understanding of our users — analysts, operators, engineers, decision-makers, and mission leaders — and turn their hardest problems into scalable product capabilities.
• Decide what belongs in the core platform, what belongs in applications, what should be enabled through partners and integrations, and what we should deliberately not build.
• Establish product discovery and development processes that allow us to move quickly without becoming a collection of customer-specific features.
• Work directly with customers and prospective customers to understand workflows, validate product direction, and identify capabilities that can become repeatable platform primitives.
• Define product success metrics and use customer behavior, deployment experience, and market feedback to continuously refine priorities.
• Maintain a strong point of view about the evolution of enterprise and mission AI, agentic systems, AI infrastructure, and human-machine collaboration.

Technology & Architecture

• Own the technical architecture and long-term technology strategy for ARIA.
• Define the architecture for a platform capable of orchestrating AI reasoning, tools, data, policy, human approvals, memory, and execution across complex workflows.
• Ensure ARIA can operate across cloud, hybrid, disconnected, air-gapped, and classified environments without fragmenting into separate products.
• Drive architectural decisions around agent orchestration, model abstraction, data and knowledge infrastructure, distributed systems, APIs, security boundaries, observability, policy enforcement, and auditability.
• Ensure the platform remains model-agnostic and capable of taking advantage of rapid advances in foundation models, open-source models, inference infrastructure, and agent frameworks.
• Establish technical standards that allow the platform to scale dramatically in customers, workloads, data volume, integrations, and engineering contributors.
• Make thoughtful build-versus-buy-versus-partner decisions and prevent unnecessary technical complexity.
• Maintain a high bar for reliability, security, performance, developer experience, and maintainability.

AI & Agentic Systems

• Lead the company's technical strategy for agentic AI and AI-assisted decision systems.
• Drive how ARIA approaches reasoning, planning, tool use, context management, memory, evaluation, human-in-the-loop control, and multi-agent workflows.
• Build systems that make probabilistic AI useful inside environments that require deterministic controls and accountable outcomes.
• Establish rigorous approaches to AI evaluation, testing, observability, failure analysis, and continuous improvement.
• Ensure customers can understand not simply what an AI system produced, but the reasoning context, evidence, policies, tools, approvals, and actions that led to an outcome.
• Continuously evaluate emerging models, frameworks, research, and infrastructure and determine where advances should materially change our product or architecture.

Engineering Leadership

• Build and lead a world-class engineering organization capable of moving with startup speed while delivering software suitable for mission-critical environments.
• Recruit exceptional engineers, technical leaders, product leaders, and designers as the company scales.
• Establish an engineering culture centered on technical excellence, ownership, velocity, intellectual honesty, and pragmatic execution.
• Develop engineering leaders and create an organizational structure that can scale without introducing unnecessary management layers or bureaucracy.
• Own engineering planning, prioritization, quality, technical debt, and delivery.
• Establish the development practices, architecture review processes, testing standards, release processes, and operational disciplines necessary to maintain velocity as the platform grows.
• Remain technically engaged. You do not need to be the person writing every feature, but you should be capable of reviewing architecture, challenging implementation decisions, debugging difficult problems, prototyping ideas, and earning the respect of exceptional engineers.

Customer & Mission Engineering

• Work directly with customers to understand complex operational environments and translate those requirements into scalable product architecture.
• Participate in technical demonstrations, architecture discussions, design sessions, and strategic customer engagements.
• Partner with mission and deployment teams to ensure lessons from implementations rapidly influence the core product.
• Help customers understand how ARIA fits into their existing data, AI, security, and operational ecosystems.
• Serve as a senior technical voice with government, commercial, technology, and strategic partners.
• Balance the urgency of solving immediate customer problems with the discipline required to build a repeatable software platform.
• Serve as a core member of the executive team and help shape company strategy beyond the boundaries of product and engineering.
• Partner directly with the CEO on company strategy, market positioning, product narrative, organizational design, recruiting, partnerships, and capital allocation.
• Translate complex technology into a compelling vision for customers, employees, partners, investors, and the broader market.
• Represent the company's technical vision externally with customers, partners, industry leaders, and the technical community.
• Help define and defend the category ADS intends to create: the operational trust layer for AI in high-consequence environments.

Required Qualifications

• 15+ years of progressive software engineering, product engineering, or technology leadership experience, with substantial experience building and leading high-performing engineering organizations.
• Experience serving as a senior engineering or product/technology leader — such as CTO, CPO, VP Engineering, VP Product, Head of Engineering, Chief Architect, Distinguished Engineer, or equivalent — with meaningful ownership of both technical direction and product outcomes.
• Demonstrated experience taking sophisticated enterprise software products from concept through production and significant customer adoption.
• Exceptional technical depth in modern software architecture, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, APIs, data platforms, or similarly complex enterprise systems.
• Strong understanding of modern AI systems, including LLMs, agent architectures, retrieval and context systems, tool use, model evaluation, and the rapidly evolving AI infrastructure ecosystem.
• Demonstrated ability to make consequential architectural decisions while balancing speed, scalability, reliability, security, and long-term maintainability.
• Experience building and managing exceptional engineering teams, including recruiting senior technical talent and developing engineering leaders.
• Strong product instincts and demonstrated ability to translate ambiguous customer problems into coherent, scalable products.
• Experience working directly with sophisticated enterprise customers and navigating the tension between customer requirements and product strategy.
• Ability to operate effectively in an early-stage environment where strategy, architecture, recruiting, customer conversations, and hands-on problem solving frequently happen in the same day.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical audiences.
• A track record of shipping.

Strongly Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building AI/ML platforms, developer platforms, data infrastructure, security platforms, workflow/orchestration systems, or other technically sophisticated enterprise software.
• Experience building products that sit between infrastructure and applications and become foundational components of a customer's technology stack.
• Experience scaling a product and engineering organization through a period of rapid company growth.
• Experience with security-sensitive, regulated, mission-critical, or high-availability environments.
• Familiarity with deployment into government, defense, intelligence, critical infrastructure, or other high-consequence environments.
• Experience with disconnected, edge, on-premises, or air-gapped deployment models.
• Experience developing platforms or ecosystems that enable third-party developers, partners, or customers to build on top of a core product.
• Demonstrated technical thought leadership through open-source contributions, patents, publications, speaking, or recognized leadership within a technical community.

Prior national security experience is valuable, but it is not required. We care more about your ability to build exceptional technology, understand difficult customer problems, lead extraordinary engineers, and learn a complex mission domain quickly.

The Person We're Looking For

• You are probably uncomfortable being described as purely a CTO, purely a CPO, or purely an engineering executive.
• You have strong opinions about architecture, but you care about whether customers actually use what you build.
• You can spend the morning debating the architecture of an agent runtime, the afternoon working through a mission workflow with a customer, and the evening helping recruit an exceptional engineer.
• You understand that great product organizations do not simply implement requirements. They develop a point of view about the problem, identify the primitives underneath individual customer requests, and build systems that become more valuable as more use cases are added.
• You are excited by the technical possibilities of AI but skeptical of systems that cannot explain, constrain, evaluate, or govern their behavior.
• Most importantly, you want to build.

About Agentic Defense Solutions Inc

Agentic Defense Solutions exists to solve the real problem in mission-critical AI: not better models, but the operational trust layer that makes AI governable, auditable, and safe to deploy in high-consequence environments.

Our Mission

Most people think the challenge in mission-critical AI is better models. It isn't. The real problem is there is no control plane for how AI reasons, makes decisions, and executes operations in high-consequence environments.

Agentic Defense Solutions builds the ARIA product family: the operational trust layer for AI where decisions have real-world impact. From the ARIA Platform foundation to the ARIA Hermes application, we provide the infrastructure that makes AI governable, auditable, and safe to deploy so that warfighters, analysts, operators, and decision-makers can leverage AI with confidence.

We believe that AI accountability shouldn't be an afterthought. It should be the foundation. ARIA enforces policy, keeps an immutable audit trail, supports human-in-the-loop, and is built for air-gapped and classified deployment from day one.

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