Co-Founding CTO
About the Role
This is a co-founder-level CTO opportunity at an early-stage AI-powered smart home intelligence startup, where you'll own the full technical vision from architecture through team-building. Your work will directly shape how properties detect anomalies, optimise energy usage, and manage connected systems - at scale.
What You'll Do
Own and continuously evolve the technical architecture across IoT, cloud, and AI/ML layers.
Lead and grow the engineering team, including hiring, mentoring, and setting engineering culture.
Drive the product roadmap from a technical perspective, balancing long-term innovation with near-term execution.
Write production code and solve critical technical problems hands-on alongside your team.
Represent the technical vision to investors, partners, and external stakeholders.
What We're Looking For
10+ years of software engineering or technical leadership experience, with 3+ years in senior technical leadership roles.
Proven 0→1 startup experience as a co-founder or early-stage CTO - not an exclusively large-company background.
Strong IoT and embedded systems background with hands-on experience shipping real products.
Cloud architecture expertise, preferably AWS, with a track record of designing and deploying scalable systems.
Practical AI/ML product experience applied to production systems.
Hardware and software crossover experience, with fluency across both embedded and software systems integration.
Hands-on coding ability - you're comfortable jumping into the codebase, not purely managing.
Familiarity with the smart home, building tech, or energy management domain is a plus.
German or Spanish language proficiency is a plus.
Comfortable working with a stack that includes React, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Raspberry Pi, ThingsBoard, and AI/ML tooling.
Compensation & Benefits
Salary range: €60,000-€100,000 annually, discussed case by case.
Co-founding equity up to 5% via an earn-in structure.
Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
On-site role primarily based in the Balearic Islands, Spain, with ties to Munich, Germany. Multiple Spanish and German city hubs considered.