Co-Founder & CTO

About the Role

This is an equal co-founder opportunity, not a conventional senior hire. You will own all technical and research strategy at an early-stage creative AI marketplace, joining at the ground floor with meaningful equity and full responsibility for shaping the product, the data infrastructure, and the research roadmap.

What You'll Do

• Own technical and research strategy end to end, from current workflows to a proprietary training and evaluation platform for creative AI agents.

• Build data infrastructure that connects briefs, creator submissions, generation traces, decisions, critique, and campaign outcomes.

• Design systems that evaluate, rank, critique, generate, and continuously improve creative work.

• Develop the allocation policy that directs campaign budget and simultaneously shapes dataset collection.

• Make core decisions on frontier model usage, fine-tuning, post-training, reinforcement learning, and original research directions.

• Set standards for data quality, consent, privacy, measurement, and model evaluation.

• Recruit and lead the first engineering and research team.

• Work directly with creators, brands, and investors.

What We're Looking For

• Hands-on experience building preference or reward models, including RLHF, reward modeling, ranking subjective outputs, or evaluation systems.

• Comfort with causal inference on observational data: selection bias, off-policy or counterfactual evaluation, adaptive experimentation, or validating cheap proxies against delayed outcomes.

• Production ML experience in ads, marketplace, recommender, or ranking systems tied to real business outcomes.

• Experience with bandits, sequential allocation, or online experimentation at scale.

• A track record of shipping real products or features used by real people, not only research prototypes.

• Experience owning a model, evaluation, or infrastructure program end to end.

• Experience recruiting and leading strong technical teams.

• Background at a frontier AI lab or research organization of comparable caliber is a strong signal.

• Multimodal generation, agents, planning systems, or latent-variable modeling experience is valued.

• Prior founder experience, including ventures that have since ended, is a plus.

• High agency, intellectual honesty, low ego, and genuine curiosity about creativity and human feedback.

• Able to commit full-time, in person in San Francisco, as an equal co-founder.

Compensation & Benefits

• Equity: approximately 28% as an equal co-founder

• Cash compensation: discussed directly based on circumstances and fit

Location

On-site, full-time in San Francisco, California, United States.