Co-Founder & CTO
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Nov 4, 2026. First seen by Alion on Nov 1, 2026. Clera scores B on the Alion truth index.
About the Role
Join an early-stage creative AI and advertising company as a full-time technical co-founder and CTO. You will shape technical and research strategy, build a platform that learns from creative workflows and outcomes, and lead the initial engineering and research team.
What You'll Do
Set technical and research strategy, evolving existing workflows into a proprietary training and evaluation platform.
Build data infrastructure connecting creative briefs, submissions, generation traces, decisions, critiques, and campaign outcomes.
Develop systems to evaluate, rank, critique, generate, and improve creative work.
Design budget allocation policies that guide campaigns and support useful data collection.
Choose approaches across frontier models, fine-tuning, post-training, reinforcement learning, and original research.
Build reliable infrastructure for creator workflows, campaigns, experimentation, training, and inference.
Establish standards for data quality, consent, privacy, measurement, and model evaluation.
Recruit and lead the first engineering and research team, working directly with creators and brands.
What We're Looking For
Substantial experience in AI research or post-training, including hands-on preference or reward modeling, RLHF, reinforcement learning, or evaluation of subjective outputs.
Experience shipping products or features used by people, and owning a model, evaluation, or infrastructure program end to end.
Strong background in causal inference with observational data, including selection bias, counterfactual or off-policy evaluation, and adaptive experimentation.
Experience with production ML infrastructure and ads, marketplace, recommender, or ranking systems tied to business outcomes.
Comfort learning from noisy, delayed, or subjective outcomes and a record of recruiting and leading technical talent.
Experience with Python and relevant areas such as bandits, sequential allocation, online experimentation, multimodal ML, agents, planning, or hierarchical modeling is valuable.
Willingness to commit full-time, work on-site in San Francisco, and take equal co-founder responsibility in an early-stage environment.
Compensation & Benefits
Equity is approximately 28% as a co-founder. Cash compensation is discussed based on circumstances and fit. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
On-site in San Francisco, California, United States.