Co-Founder - CTO

About KARST

KARST is an operations and technology firm that designs and implements Intelligent Operating Systems to deliver commercial outcomes. Built by operators. Powered by AI. Measured in outcomes.

We are building a hybrid agentic and human workforce that does the delivery work for our clients. The architecture plans exist, some agent builds are complete, and a pipeline of client work is developing. But there’s work to be done and the build and delivery continues and evolves daily.

We are a small, senior team and we are looking for a technical co-founder who can build to own client delivery end-to-end. Someone who takes the reigns and takes care of work getting built, shipped and paid for, whilst pushing the company forward as a whole.

The role

Two things run at once and you own both: the platform we are building, and the client delivery that drives it. The core of the job is keeping them coherent by shipping client outcomes that generate cash while architecting the reusable platform underneath, without letting delivery pressure fragment it into one-off builds.

You will set the engineering standards, lead the build team, and stay close enough to the code that your judgement stays sharp. This is hands-on technical ownership, not a management layer above the work.

You are a founder at heart, not a hire who happens to be senior. You own the outcome, not just the code. That includes the client relationship, the sale, the delivery, and the revenue that follows because what you shipped was worth paying for. You carry it end-to-end, so it never routes back to anyone else to check, fix or rescue. You are a driving force for the company, and you build with your own hands.

And the thing we care about most: you can build the engineering discipline itself, not just direct it. The testing regimes, the quality control, the release process, and critically the reporting that lets non-technical executives see clearly what is happening.

What you will do

Own the outcome, like a founder

• Own client relationships and delivery end-to-end. You are the person the client deals with and trusts. You scope it, build it, ship it, and stand behind it, so delivery never becomes someone else’s problem to chase.

• Sell, and carry the commercial result. Win the work and get paid for it. You can sit in front of a prospect, earn the engagement, and make sure what ships is worth what the client pays.

• Be a driving force, not a backstop-dependent hire. Take responsibility on and move things forward without being asked. Manage the people around you and lift them, so nobody above you has to check the work or fix it. You are one of the people the company runs on.

Own the technology and the discipline

• Own the technical direction of the whole system for both platform and client delivery, and the architecture that holds them together.

• Build quality as a system. Design the standards, processes and automated protection that prevent defects across an AI-driven codebase, repositioning quality from a release gate into a discipline built into how everything is made.

• Own the AI testing and reliability regime. An evaluation stack built for agents, deterministic checks, AI-judged scoring, golden datasets to prevent regression. Plus reliability testing across many runs and real-world failure conditions.

• Own release and observability. Automated regression suites, staged and canary rollouts, and step-level tracing of agent reasoning and tool calls so failures can be found and fixed fast.

Lead, build and decide

• Set the engineering standards: how the team builds, tests, ships and maintains everything.

• Lead and grow the build team, lifting capability and owning the quality of what ships.

• Stay hands-on: close enough to the build to make real architectural calls and keep the team honest.

• Make the build/buy decisions, choose the tools, and own the technical roadmap.

• Deliver client-facing agent systems that have to perform in the real world from day one.

What you will need

• A strong track record building and shipping production systems and the architectural judgement that only comes from having done it for years.

• A genuine systems thinker who can design and own the whole engineering process.

• Real fluency with AI and agent systems. You understand how to build with LLMs and make them work reliably in production, and you know how to test and evaluate them.

• The compound skill: you can lead the technology and stay technical. You can develop a team and a platform and still answer a probing question about how the system scales.

• Experience owning architecture and technical decisions end-to-end.

• You can translate technical reality into plain commercial language for non-technical founders, and keep the technology serving the business.

• You want to own your function, not just a codebase. You are comfortable in front of clients, can sell and carry a commercial relationship, and you take responsibility for outcomes and revenue.

• You operate without a backstop. You take a domain and own it completely, so nobody above you has to check it, fix it or rescue it.

• The judgement to set direction for a team and a platform from the start.

Bonus

• You have been a technical founder or an early/senior engineer who has built something from nothing.

• Broad infrastructure and cloud experience (we use Supabase, Temporal, Pinecone, GitHub and the Anthropic stack, etc. today — you will decide where it goes next).

• You have built and led engineering teams before.

Who this is for

You have done the big-end-of-town thing, built real systems, earned your reputation, and you want autonomy now. The chance to own the technical heart of a business, without the politics. You are not chasing a salary. You are chasing the build.

Equally, if you have the chops and this is the natural next step up into the seat then we are open. What matters is that you can do it, not how long you have held the title.

The team you are joining

A senior founding team with prior exits, former CEOs and senior executives of global concerns. There is substantial work already done and real IP already built. You are joining people who have operated at the top and are now building something special.

You join as a co-founder and a peer. You own the technology and you help run the company, and the responsibility with it. A true partner, not a hire with a senior title. The people here have built and run things before, and you are one of them.

How we work

The role is currently fully remote and you can be based anywhere in Australia. Our founding team sits across the east coast, so a distributed team is how KARST already operates. We come together in person

in blocks of time for the work that benefits most from being in the same room. The role requires you to be based in Australia with the ongoing and unrestricted right to work here.

Remuneration

A founder-level opportunity, structured as one. A founder-level salary, a real equity stake you can earn or buy into, and a funded runway behind you that's been funded by the current founding team.