Technical Co-Founder

Company Description

Project Light Advisory builds AI-driven culture management solutions grounded in decades of hands-on transformation work, including fourteen years at McKinsey & Company across some ninety countries and two hundred client organizations.

We believe culture can be a source of genuine, lasting advantage — and that most organizations never get there because they are flying blind. Every other function inside a large enterprise has been professionalized. Finance, Risk, Talent and Procurement all have standards, maturity models and a body of practice. Culture doesn't yet. We are building the standard that changes that, and the AI that brings it to life.

The timing matters. AI adoption is putting culture at the centre of the conversation: in the 2025 AI & Data Leadership Executive Benchmark Survey, 92% of Fortune 1000 executives named cultural and change-management challenges — not technology — as the main thing standing between them and becoming AI-driven. Organizations are being invited to take culture seriously by the very thing they hoped would let them skip it.

We do this through a AI powered culture management platform, supported by education offerings and consulting work that help organizations build a real internal culture function. The long-term vision is a world in which culture is a core business function, held to the same rigor as Finance.

Role Description

We are looking for a founding partner who is on a similar path as us, but brings a complementary profile. Someone that has seen and felt the importance of culture as the long term driver of performance.

We are a small, senior team with a large ambition, and technology is the a capability we need to strengthen. We have developed the methodology — including at McKinsey where the founder led the Culture and Change service line for ~90 countires, now encoded as ~10 specialist AI agents plus an orchestrator that runs an organization's annual culture transformation process. We have the specification, the architecture options, the prototype and a real pipeline. We are looking for a tech expert alongside us whose judgment carries the same weight as the method does.

What we'd build together

• The technology foundation. Cloud and hosting, the agent framework, the retrieval architecture, the data layer, the security and tenancy model. These are yours to shape
• Choosing well. We build with implementation partners rather than a large in-house team, and we intend to keep it that way. You'd write the specifications, run the selection, read the bids for substance, and hold partners to what they promised. Being an excellent buyer of technology is a craft in itself, and it's central here
• Economics that hold up. Not just what works today, but what still works — and still makes money — once we scale
• The evaluation layer. Our methodology is the recipe. The graded dataset that shows an agent gave the right answer rather than a merely plausible one is what makes this defensible. The eval harness, the regression suite, the retrieval discipline that keeps generation grounded in our method — that's some of the most interesting work in the company.
• Knowledge engineering. We hold years of experience doing this work manually - as consultants. Turning that into retrieval infrastructure — safely, legally, with full respect for client confidentiality — is a genuinely hard and genuinely rewarding problem

Why the human side matters as much as the technical side

We build tools for human and organizational transformation. That isn't incidental to the work — it's the point of it.

The people who thrive here have done some version of the inner work themselves: coaching, therapy, meditation, men's or women's work, systemic or somatic practice, a serious personal development path — whatever form it has taken. Not as a line on a CV. Because you have sat with how hard it is to change yourself, and that's the truest preparation for taking seriously how hard it is for ten thousand people at once.

If organizational culture, human development and consciousness are things you find genuinely alive — and you happen to be an excellent technologist — this is a rare combination to find in one role. If that doesn't speak to you, that's completely fine; it simply isn't the right match, and we'd both rather know early.

How we'd start

This is a full-time, long-term role, and we intend it to become a founding one.

We'd begin with a paid three-month period in which the first step would to take a number of decisions together. We are in the middle of an RfP process for our external tech partner and in weeks we will have all the information we need to make the decision on how to move forward. There are lots of potential pathways, and finding the right one requires broad experience in technology and a well calibrated inner compass.

Equity, title and the founding conversation come at the end of that, when we both know. We'd rather earn that together than promise it in a job advert.

Belgrade preferred, with regular time together in person. Remote across European or Gulf time zones works well for the right person. Some travel — Dubai, the Western Balkans, and wherever our clients are.

Qualifications

• Eight or more years designing and building production software, including at least one system where a large language model sat on the critical path and made it into real use.
• Deep and wide — enough depth in enough places to hold a whole architecture in your head, see how the parts fit together, and sense where they'll strain under load or cost.
• Real judgment on infrastructure and economics: you can explain not only why a design works, but why it still works financially at scale.
• Experience as the client-side technical owner of an outsourced or partner-led build — writing the specification, choosing the partner, reading the bids, holding the standard.
• Hands-on with retrieval architecture, agent orchestration and context engineering; pragmatic and unattached about model choice.
• Able to write a specification a partner understands on first read, and to say "I don't think that will work, and here's why" in a way that's heard.
• Enterprise-grade instincts on data protection, tenancy isolation and audit — our clients are CHROs and boards at organizations of 500 to 50,000 people.
• Comfortable as the technologist in a small team, working closely with founders rather than through a hierarchy.
• A genuine personal connection to human and organizational development, and an inner practice of your own in whatever form it takes.
• Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience. What you've built matters more to us than where you studied.
• Experience in HR and the human side of transformation, leadership development, culture transformation

Not required: culture transformation or culture-tech background — that's what we bring. Research-grade ML either; we're not a lab. We build on frontier models and win on method.

How to apply

Please apply only if you feel a strong inner knowing. Apply through LinkedIn. Here are 3 key questions to reflect on as you apply:

1. Experiences of where you have done similar things in the past and what the outcome was
2. A significant technology decision you got wrong, what it cost, and what you learned from it
3. How this role aligns with the next phase of the greatest contribution you can make in this lifetime