CTO / Founding Technical Lead

CTO / Founding Technical Lead - Foundation Models for Human Behaviour (Stealth, US / Remote)

A stealth AI company is building foundation models to understand human behaviour — inferring latent states like intent, belief, trust and hesitation from real conversation, and deciding the best next action to steer an interaction toward an outcome.

Think of it as a world-model-and-planning loop applied to people: infer someone’s hidden state, choose the next move, observe how they respond, update, and learn from the outcome. The twist is that it’s grounded in a live, real-world environment already generating proprietary interaction data at scale - so the models learn from real human experience, not synthetic simulation.

The founder is a proven, repeat operator who previously built and scaled a vertical-AI company to strong product-market fit and a significant raise. There’s already a research team in place, including a CSO with deep reinforcement-learning and sequential-decision-making expertise.

What’s missing is the technical leader who can turn that research into real, deployed, real-time systems - and help define the technical direction from the ground up.

What you’d own

• The model and research-to-production strategy: how the behavioural models get built (post-training, fine-tuning, eventually foundation models), evaluated, and shipped
• Turning advanced research into production — real-time inference, training infrastructure, data pipelines, experimentation, evaluation, latency
• Connecting the modelling to real-world outcomes, not just benchmarks
• Building and leading the engineering team as the company scales

What we’re looking for

• Deep, hands-on ML experience — ideally some combination of LLM post-training / RL, latent-state or behavioural modelling, and taking models into production at low latency
• Genuine research fluency: you can engage a research scientist as a peer, even if you don’t come from a pure-research background
• Someone who’s built things, owns outcomes, and operates with high agency — a founder’s mentality, whether or not you’ve founded before
• Low ego, intellectually curious, first-principles thinker — happy to be challenged and to change your mind
• Relevant backgrounds might include: foundation-model / agent training, conversational or multimodal AI, world models / autonomous systems, recommender systems, or sequential decision-making — the common thread is connecting model quality to real-world outcomes

The package

• A genuine founding-level technical seat with meaningful equity and salary from day one
• Distributed team, remote-friendly (US). Some travel / in-person time early on; no hard relocation requirement
• An early-stage company with funding, customers and a real operating business already in motion — you’d be shaping the core, not inheriting it