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Founding CTO/Head of Engineering at AI Startup (backed by a16z Speedrun, pre-seed) (Palo Alto)
Founding CTO/Head of Engineering at AI Startup (backed by a16z Speedrun, pre-seed) (Palo Alto)SUN • Palo Alto, CA, United States
Founding CTO / Head of Engineering at AI Startup (backed by a16z Speedrun, pre-seed) (Palo Alto)

Founding CTO / Head of Engineering at AI Startup (backed by a16z Speedrun, pre-seed) (Palo Alto)

SUN • Palo Alto, CA, United States
[job_card.variable_days_ago]
[job_preview.job_type]
  • [job_card.full_time]
[job_card.job_description]

SUN is an AI audio-learning app. A GenAI alternative to Audible and podcasts. We turn any topic, book, or idea into a high-quality audio course, with real-time Q&A while listening.

We just got into the a16z Speedrun SR006 program (0.3% acceptance rate), kicking off this January in San Francisco.

Were now looking for a Founding CTO, a Staff / Principal-level AI Engineer. Someone who is positive, slightly delusional (in the best founder way), a high-performer with high integrity, and genuinely smart.

If thats you, youll feel at home here.

Responsibilities

  • Architect, build, and ship code daily across AI, web, mobile, and infra
  • Lead and mentor team engineers
  • Design and optimize our AI system : quality, speed, cost, evals, context, TTS, conversational agents
  • Own the entire technical roadmap from 01 and beyond
  • Recruit, hire, and build the early engineering team
  • Establish engineering culture, velocity, and standards from day one
  • Help define the DNA of the company

Qualifications

  • 5+ years architecting, shipping & scaling AI products
  • Deep experience with LLMs, evals, context / retrieval systems, TTS, agents, and model integration
  • Comfortable across the stack : Flutter, Node, Supabase, AWS, DevOps, pipelines, instrumentation
  • Experience recruiting and building small, elite engineering teams
  • Ideally Bay Areabased (well be in SF during a16z Speedrun program)
  • Bias toward action, craftsmanship, and building fast without drama
  • Positive attitude, high personal integrity, and the founder-level ambition to build something huge

    • What we offer

  • Founding equity, ownership, and a much lower salary than at big tech lol
  • A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help build the next unicorn company from day zero
  • Direct access to a16zs network and Speedrun support at the earliest stage

    • If youre a Silicon Valley experienced AI Engineer who codes daily, ships, and dreams big, lets talk.

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    Founding Engineering • Palo Alto, CA, United States

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