Syntony
Remote · U.S. citizens only · Equity-only to start
This role starts with substantial equity-only compensation, with no salary or cash compensation at the outset. Future cash compensation is contingent on Syntony meeting its fundraising goals. The CTO will play a key role in achieving those goals alongside the founder.
Syntony builds AI evaluation and governance products that help organizations understand how AI systems fail and turn those findings into practical decisions and controls.
We’re looking for a CTO / Founding Engineer to work directly with the founder on technical direction, product development, and company growth. This is a hands-on founding role: you’ll write and review code, guide engineering delivery, pitch investors, and build relationships with customers, partners, and collaborators.
You should enjoy taking ownership of open-ended problems and working through ambiguity in a fast-paced, early-stage environment. Expect to move between architecture decisions, product demonstrations, investor conversations, and shipping software. Fundraising and relationship building are core responsibilities of the role.
In this role, you will:
- Set engineering priorities with the founder, translating research and customer needs into practical product milestones.
- Design and build AI evaluation and governance software, including GovTune AI and Resonance.
- Make architecture decisions across product interfaces, APIs, evaluation tooling, and data systems.
- Establish sound practices for code review, testing, deployment, security, and documentation.
- Help select and guide engineers and contractors while continuing to contribute code.
- Work with researchers and users to make evaluation evidence reliable, understandable, and useful in decisions.
- Play a key role in meeting Syntony’s fundraising goals: build investor relationships, shape the technical and product story, pitch investors alongside the founder, demonstrate product progress, and respond to technical due diligence.
- Build connections with prospective customers, partners, researchers, and engineers to support collaboration, product feedback, and company growth.
We’re looking for someone with:
- 7+ years of engineering experience, ideally 10+, including shipping and maintaining production software and owning architecture decisions.
- Experience leading engineers or technical projects while remaining hands-on.
- Strong backend and data engineering skills, with an understanding of product development and deployment.
- Sound judgment about reliability, security, access controls, and the tradeoffs of building with a small team.
- Clear communication across technical and nontechnical audiences.
- Comfort making decisions with incomplete information, adapting as priorities evolve, and balancing rapid delivery with thoughtful engineering.
- Willingness to represent Syntony in investor, customer, and partner conversations and help build the relationships needed to grow the company.
Experience with AI evaluation, agent systems, ML security, or governance software is valuable. We assess demonstrated work and technical judgment; a graduate degree is not required.
- The position is remote and open to U.S. citizens only. The equity grant, vesting terms, responsibilities, and expected time commitment will be discussed and agreed in writing before work begins. Any future cash compensation depends on meeting Syntony’s fundraising goals, with its timing and terms also agreed in writing.