[Remote] Founding CTO - AI Engineering

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Axial Search is collaborating with a seed-stage AI company to fill a senior technical leadership role. The Founding CTO will drive the company's AI technical strategy and lead the development of AI capabilities while actively participating in investor conversations and the seed raise process.ResponsibilitiesLead the company’s AI technical strategy across product development, implementation and deploymentOwn the technical narrative in investor conversations, particularly around AI strategy, defensibility and executionOwn hands-on development of AI capabilities across early product builds, pilots and production systemsMake practical decisions on model selection, LLM tooling, fine-tuning, orchestration and related AI engineering approachesBuild and improve AI systems that create persistent organizational intelligence over timeDevelop approaches for evaluating AI system performance, reliability and output qualityEstablish strong practices around guardrails, testing, monitoring and continuous improvementRecruit, lead and develop a small team of engineers as the company scalesDrive engineering velocity in a lean seed-stage environment where priorities shift quicklySkillsDeep technical expertise in AI, machine learning, neural networks and modern generative AI systemsHands-on experience building with large language models in commercial or production environmentsExperience with fine-tuning, LLM tooling, agentic systems, orchestration or related applied AI techniquesStrong coding ability, with willingness to remain deeply involved in technical executionFounder-level ownership mentality, with appetite for meaningful equity and seed-stage riskStartup experience strongly preferred, especially zero-to-one or early product buildout experienceExperience in a high-growth software company also highly relevantPrior fundraising exposure strongly preferred, with the ability to credibly own the technical narrative in front of VCsCompany OverviewTechnology doesn’t transform companies. People do. It was founded in undefined, and is headquartered in , with a workforce of 2-10 employees. Its website is https://www.axialsearch.com.