CTO (Chief Technology Officer)

Parallax Innovations is a civic communications lab building modern persuasion infrastructure for the movement to improve American democracy and elections.

We support organizations and campaigns advancing nonpartisan democracy reforms through our narrative intelligence platform. We combine technology, data, and services to help our partners reach, engage, and persuade voters in our fast-evolving information ecosystem. We enable partners with strategic guidance and hands-on production and editing support to build strong vertical-video operations across TikTok, Reels, and Shorts. Our products make it easier for campaigns to mobilize supporters as creators, equipping them with tools that draw on our intelligence and predictive capabilities to improve content before it ships. And our data assets – including an enriched voter file with audience-specific insights – help campaigns deploy and amplify the right content to the specific voters they need to reach.

Our primary focus is solving the Primary Problem—a system of party primaries that excludes millions of voters and rewards elected leaders for answering to a narrow partisan electorate. We help advance open primaries that give voters more voice and choice and leaders stronger incentives to represent their communities.

Parallax is incubated by Unite America, and is based in Denver.

As Chief Technology Officer, you will own the ongoing development and improvement of Parallax's primary competitive advantage: a narrative intelligence platform that learns what persuades Americans on reform issues, and how. You own everything engineering, AI, data, privacy & compliance, infrastructure, security, with strong influence over adjacent workflows. You also serve as an organizational leader, driving strategy and organization prioritization.

We approach persuasion like infrastructure: a lasting capability that helps the movement learn, improve and win across campaigns and election cycles. Our ambition is to build a closed-loop learning system that gets smarter every time we speak. Its AI core will connect the content we create with engagement data, audience research and experiments to learn which messages, messengers and formats work with which voters—and feed those lessons back into how we create, target and distribute the next communication.

Over each election cycle, Parallax will support a number of reform campaigns, many of them ballot initiatives. Each campaign has to reach different audiences: progressives, conservatives, independents, and the large group of Americans who are disengaged or simply worn out by politics. Our product lowers the barrier for supporters to become compelling content creators, and our platform provides guidance on frames, formats, messengers and messages are likely to work.

This is an executive role requiring technical depth and a hands-on approach to using modern engineering tools, as well as broader organizational leadership skills. You’ll craft the product vision, lead the contract engineers in developing the platform, and be the decision-maker about architecture, models, data and resources. You’ll also champion the technical vision, progress, and investment requirements to executive leadership, the Board, and potential investors. You will inherit a contract data and engineering team, and from there you will determine how the team develops, including budget development and hiring.

You will serve as a senior executive responsible for the technical integration of Parallax’s data, products, and services. Alongside the Chief of Staff and VP of Product & Partnerships, you will develop and drive organizational strategy, translate priorities into work plans and budgets, and align the team around measurable results. Ideal candidates for this role will have the judgment and management ability to assume broader organizational leadership as Parallax grows.

This role reports to the President, and is based in Denver. Relocations welcome. Exceptional candidates based elsewhere will be considered if they can commit to periodic trips to Denver.

These will be your accountabilities:

Own the development of Parallax’s core technology and competitive advantage.

• Set platform strategy and capabilities roadmap: what it should measure, what its learning agenda will be, what inputs it expands to include, and how it learns and improves quarter over quarter.
• Define the scoring framework: how content engagement and persuasion are quantified for Parallax, how they are weighted, and how scores connect to real outcomes.
• Extend our intelligence platform beyond transcript-analysis so that it evaluates videos, including visuals, presenters, format and production choices.
• Make the model decisions: which commercial and open models to use and route between, whether fine-tuning or custom components are worth it, and the tradeoffs in cost, speed and accuracy.
• Build the data loop so that performance data from platforms, partners, audience surveys and experiments flows back into the platform cleanly and in an accretive fashion.
• Oversee the development of dashboards and reporting that can explain what the platform is accomplishing, for internal and partner audiences.
• Ensure the platform adheres to data compliance laws and a set of AI ethics guidelines which will need to be fully articulated (e.g. no deceptive or synthetic content).

Prove that it works, explain its limits.

• Design and run the platform validation agenda: back-test against historical content, compare predictions with actual results, and check findings against survey and experimental (including RCT) evidence.
• Build the evals and guardrails that let the platform learn within defined limits, so its outputs can be trusted and explained.
• Report clearly to leadership, funders and partners on what the intelligence platform can tell us today, how confident we are, and what it cannot yet do.

Turn intelligence into decisions.

• Translate platform findings into clear, weekly guidance the creative team uses on frame, format, messenger and audience.
• Work with the Creative studio and Partners team to support mapping the message-by-audience grid across active campaigns: what has been tested, what is working, and where the gaps are.
• Help package Parallax's intelligence effectively so that partner organizations and campaign teams can use it to make more persuasive content themselves.

Shape our technology ecosystem, build the team as needed.

• As the platform expands, expand your influence and help shape the roadmap for Parallax's other internal tools and products so they effectively interoperate with the core, working closely with the people who build and deploy them.
• Take over the current contractor-based data and engineering squad; decide what to keep, build or buy. Own team development, budget, and hiring, in collaboration with leadership.
• Build alongside the team with the latest AI tools, and set the standard for how Parallax uses AI responsibly.
• Help the President and leadership team set Parallax's strategy, and work closely with the Chief of Staff and the VP of Product & Partnerships on org-wide initiatives.

What success looks like:

First 60 days: you’ve facilitated a shared platform vision that is in sharp focus, pulled together a leadership-approved roadmap and clear technical ownership. An initial intelligence platform scoring framework should be in place to enable the creative team to run strong week-to-week experiments, learn from results, and make each round of communications smarter.

First six months: a working feedback loop connecting content, audience and outcome data; initial scoring and predictive capabilities tested against results; and initial integrations with the partner voter file and Partner Portal. The team should be using findings to improve communications, with clear measures of progress and priorities for what comes next.

Background in technical leadership and executive accountability.

• 12+ years in engineering, machine learning, AI or data product roles, including several years leading technical teams. A recent record of shipping AI or data products, using frontier tools and methods, that people have used to make real decisions.
• Demonstrated executive leadership beyond a technical team: experience aligning multiple functions, managing senior leaders, making resource tradeoffs, and communicating strategy and results to a board or investors.
• Experience taking a data or AI product from an early version to something an organization relies on.
• High integrity. AI-assisted persuasion work in a democracy needs someone who will not overstate what a model knows, and who takes accuracy, privacy and responsible use seriously.
• Low ego, default-curious. You let results overrule your favorite hypothesis, and give credit freely.
• A builder who leads. You would rather show a prototype than describe one, and you raise the bar for the team by working alongside it. You are comfortable in a small, early organization where the plan is still being drawn.
• Bonus points if you have supported founders or principals in raising capital or philanthropic funding.

Relevant backgrounds include AI startups, intelligent platform engineering, AI-assisted political analytics, media analytics, or adtech engineering. Political or ballot-initiative experience is helpful but not required.

Mission-drive and political savviness.

• Genuine motivation for democracy reform, healthy elections, and electoral integrity. Experience in govtech, civic tech, or political or ballot initiative work is a strong plus, but not a requirement. If you don’t have this type of experience, your motivation for our mission must be truly palpable.
• A cross-partisan outlook. You can come from any political camp, but you do not demonize the others. The Parallax team includes people from across the spectrum who share the democracy mission, and that is by design.
• A political messaging lens, i.e. an understanding that progressives, conservatives, independents and disengaged voters hear the same idea differently, and curiosity about the science of persuasion. (You do not need political relationships to be competitive for this role.)

Hard skills:

• Fluency with modern AI tools: LLM APIs, multimodal models for video, image and audio, retrieval, prompt and agent design, model routing, and the tradeoffs of fine-tuning. You keep up with new models, harnesses, and other tools, and have some method for testing and experimenting with new tools as they are released.
• Evaluation and measurement in practice: Building eval sets, back-testing, A/B testing and experimental design, and enough causal inference to know the difference between content that gets engagement and content that changes minds.
• Hands-on technical depth: You can write Python and SQL, design data pipelines, and review the code and architecture your team ships.
• Product sense: You can turn what creative teams and partners need into a roadmap and specs, and decide what not to build.
• Ability to explain to nontechnical (creatives, leadership, funders) how a given product or tool works, and what its current limits are.

Generous benefits package including:

• Competitive base salary
• Unlimited PTO; generous parental leave
• Health, vision, dental insurance
• 401K with 3% match
• Company issued laptop/equipment, and reimbursements