{"id":2660482,"url":"https://alion.io/job/25madison-founding-technical-leader-ctofounding-engineer-newco","title":"Founding Technical Leader (CTO/Founding Engineer), NewCo","company":{"id":711892,"name":"25Madison","domain":"25madison.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/25madison","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Breezy","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":4,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-10-22T06:10:10Z"}},"role":"Leadership","role_family":"Leadership","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":137000,"max_usd":280000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":1268},"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon Kinesis","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":false},{"name":"Claude Code","optional":false},{"name":"Cursor","optional":false},{"name":"Docker","optional":false},{"name":"FastAPI","optional":false},{"name":"LangGraph","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"pgvector","optional":false},{"name":"Pinecone","optional":false},{"name":"Pydantic AI","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Recommender Systems","optional":false},{"name":"Windsurf","optional":false},{"name":"LangChain","optional":true},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":true},{"name":"Python","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-04-24T13:45:36Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-04-24","last_verified_at":"2026-10-22T20:09:47Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":181,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":180},"description":"Founding Technical Leader: Head of Engineering / CTO Company: Newco (Stealth)\nRole: Head of Engineering / Founding Engineer (Full-Time)\nLocation: Flexible (US, preference for NYC)\nS tage: Pre-seed (Venture Studio backed)\nComp: Significant equity + competitive cash\nWho We Are\nCommerce is undergoing a fundamental shift. For the past decade, ecommerce has been built around static pages, manual optimization, and fragmented tooling: from analytics to experimentation to personalization.\nNewco is building the AI-native intelligence layer for DTC commerce. Our platform interprets shopper behavior from the moment of ad click, scores intent in real time, and dynamically personalizes the on-site experience without requiring brands to rebuild their infrastructure. Every interaction compounds: the system learns, adapts, and improves outcomes continuously.\nThe result: higher conversion, stronger retention, and a lasting edge for brands competing in a signal-scarce, AI-native world.\nWhat You'll Do\n Define system architecture from first principles and own it end-to-end\n Build the initial product hands-on (this is a 0 to 1 role)\n Design and scale the decisioning and personalization engine across data, infra, and product layers\n Work directly with the founder on product direction and technical strategy\n Hire and lead the early engineering team as the company grows\n Communicate technical tradeoffs and system design to non-technical stakeholders in outcome-oriented terms\n Who You Are\n A builder-leader at the intersection of AI, product, and real-time systems\n Experienced in high-stakes, fast-moving environments: vertical SaaS, applied ML, or personalization/recommendation systems\n Comfortable working across backend, frontend, and product, not siloed\n Strong product intuition alongside technical execution\n Thrives in ambiguity and early-stage building\n Key Technical Responsibilities\nDecisioning and Personalization Architecture Design and scale the real-time scoring and routing engine: interpreting incomplete behavioral signals, making decisions under uncertainty, and serving personalized experiences with low latency.\n LLM and Agentic Systems Build and maintain AI agent layers using frameworks like LangGraph or PydanticAI, including modular reasoning pipelines (RAG, ReAct, planner-executor) for CRO automation and content decisioning.\n Data Infrastructure Integrate event-driven pipelines, vector databases (pgvector, Pinecone), and structured data stores to support real-time retrieval, persistent memory, and behavioral pattern recognition.\nEvaluation and Observability Build tools for trace inspection, confidence scoring, and output validation. Develop evaluation loops and test harnesses to ensure reliability and consistency across decisioning outputs.\nEngineering Architecture and Delivery Define technical standards, development processes, and system architecture to support a scalable, maintainable product. Partner with product leadership to translate strategy into roadmap.\nCore Skills\n 5 to 7+ years of full-stack engineering experience\n Experience building real-time systems, data pipelines, or decisioning / recommendation engines\n Familiarity with LLM agent development and frameworks (LangGraph, PydanticAI, or similar)\n Production-level experience with FastAPI, Docker, and cloud-native deployment\n Comfort with vector databases and retrieval-augmented generation patterns\n Proficiency in agentic IDEs (Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code)\n Bonus (not required)\n Experience in ecommerce, marketplaces, or personalization platforms\n Familiarity with event-driven or streaming architectures (Kafka, Kinesis)\n Shopify ecosystem knowledge\n What This Is Not\n Not a pure infrastructure or platform role\n Not a maintenance or scaling role\n Not joining a large existing team\n You will be building the foundation.\nWhy Join\n Significant equity + competitive cash\nTrue technical ownership: define the system architecture from day one\n Backed environment: venture studio with capital, operational support, and design partners already in market\n 0 to 1 opportunity: build a company, not just write code","description_format":"text","description_chars":4119,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-16T00:36:50Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":9,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.314,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":180,"expected_fill_days":30,"reasons":["conf:2","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-10-22T06:10:10Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/25madison-founding-technical-leader-ctofounding-engineer-newco","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/25madison-founding-technical-leader-ctofounding-engineer-newco.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-22T20:56:16Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":5259,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-23T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":711892},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=711892"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2F25madison-founding-technical-leader-ctofounding-engineer-newco"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2F25madison-founding-technical-leader-ctofounding-engineer-newco"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2F25madison-founding-technical-leader-ctofounding-engineer-newco"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/25madison-founding-technical-leader-ctofounding-engineer-newco\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2F25madison-founding-technical-leader-ctofounding-engineer-newco"}]}