Chief Technology Officer

Are you an ambitious hands-on CTO with big platform experience who’s passionate about mitigating misinformation, building prosocial media, and creating the digital infrastructure humanity needs for a better future?

BigFilter.ai is a social impact startup, backed by Janea Systems, that’s building Net-scale solutions for the global information crisis. We’re looking for a motivated and capable CTO to lead development of the innovative products and platforms essential to our mission.

We believe this position demands:

• Experience architecting, building, and scaling platforms with millions of users
• Experience creating, managing, and leading high-performing software engineering teams
• The ability to be hands-on and the wisdom to know when to be hands-off
• Strong personal integrity and professional ethics

Location	Remote
Compensation	Salary & Equity
Work Schedule	Full-time / Flexible
Reports to	CEO
Member of	Executive Team

Key Responsibilities

• Technical Strategy & Vision: Define and communicate the technical vision and strategy, ensuring alignment with the company’s mission and goals.
• Architecture & Stack: Make key architectural decisions to ensure scalability, reliability, and performance of the products. Evaluate and choose the technology stack and methods that best enable product development.
• Product Development: Work closely with the Product Team to implement features on the roadmap. Define and manage the projects, processes, and systems needed to implement the features in a way that is aligned with the company’s mission and goals.
• Technical Risk Management: Identify and mitigate technical risks to ensure the stability and reliability of the products.
• DevOps: Implement DevOps practices to streamline development, deployment, and monitoring processes.
• Engineering Team: Create, manage, and lead the engineering team. Mentor and coach team members, fostering a collaborative and high-performance culture.

The CTO will also take part in:

• Security: Prioritize security features and best practices to protect user data and privacy, and build and maintain user trust.
• Product Strategy & Vision: Articulate the product vision and strategy, ensuring alignment with the company’s mission and goals and users’ needs.
• Roadmap Development: Develop and maintain the product roadmap, prioritizing features and enhancements based on business impact and customer feedback.
• Investor Relations: Communicate product strategy and progress to investors and stakeholders.
• Regulatory Compliance: Ensure the products adhere to relevant regulatory standards and data privacy laws.

Why This Opportunity Is Exciting

• Mission-Driven Impact/Social Impact Focus: We’re working to address major unsolved problems for mankind using a cross-disciplinary approach that includes cutting-edge technology. Everyone at BigFilter.ai is committed to creating a business and products that benefit individuals while serving the greater public good.
• Strategic Leadership Role: As a member of the executive team, the CTO will have significant influence over the company’s direction. This is an opportunity to shape our technical vision, drive innovation, and be a key player in the success of a mission-driven startup.
• Our Team: We're founded and led by technology veterans with decades of experience building the communities, products, businesses, and nonprofits that power the Net. We believe in the positive potential of information technologies while also recognizing their risks, and are passionate about creating a better future for everyone.
• Architecting from the Ground Up: The role involves making key architectural decisions and selecting the technology stack. For those excited by the prospect of building scalable, reliable systems from the ground up, this offers a chance to innovate with the latest technologies.
• Scaling a Startup: We have pre-seed funding and are seeking a seed round. Being part of an early-stage startup means the CTO will play a crucial role in scaling the company’s technology and engineering team. This is an exciting challenge for those who enjoy the dynamic environment of startups and want to see their efforts directly contribute to rapid growth.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: The role offers the chance to work closely with diverse teams, including product, security, and investor relations. This collaborative environment can be very appealing to those who thrive on teamwork and holistic problem-solving.

Product & Technologies

• Our first product will help knowledge workers create and distribute high-quality knowledge more quickly, easily, and effectively. Future products will allow every web user to easily find and understand high-quality knowledge on any important public topic.
• We're building our tests and demos using off-the-shelf technologies. However, recognizing the limits of these technologies—especially with regards to bias, explainability, and energy consumption—we will need to train models and create some other technology with the characteristics we need.
• This early product will need to run at a scale similar to a smaller modern search engine. Future products will need to operate at the scale of the largest existing platforms.

Ideal Candidate Profile 

• 10+ years of experience combining deep technical expertise, leadership experience, and strategic vision.
• Proven track record of defining and executing a technical strategy that aligns with a company’s mission and business goals, preferably with experience in a startup and corporate environments.
• Extensive experience in designing and implementing scalable, reliable, and secure software architectures and platforms.
• Educational and work experience with NLP and ML.
• Previous experience in making key architectural decisions for large-scale cloud-based products.
• Experience working closely with product teams to implement features and manage product development lifecycles.
• Hands-on experience in implementing DevOps practices, including CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and infrastructure as code.
• Demonstrated ability to build and lead high-performing engineering teams. Experience  hiring, mentoring, and retaining top engineering talent.
• Experience in identifying and mitigating technical risks, ensuring the stability and reliability of a product under development.
• Previous experience in a fast-paced startup environment, particularly in a role where scaling technology and teams was a key focus. Experience with the challenges of limited resources and rapid growth is essential.

 

#LI-DNI