Founding Technical Leader (CTO/Founding Engineer), NewCo

Founding Technical Leader: Head of Engineering / CTO Company: Newco (Stealth) 

Role: Head of Engineering / Founding Engineer (Full-Time) 

Location: Flexible (US, preference for NYC) 

Stage: Pre-seed (Venture Studio backed) 

Comp: Significant equity + competitive cash

Who We Are

Commerce is undergoing a fundamental shift. For the past decade, ecommerce has been built around static pages, manual optimization, and fragmented tooling: from analytics to experimentation to personalization.

Newco is building the AI-native intelligence layer for DTC commerce. Our platform interprets shopper behavior from the moment of ad click, scores intent in real time, and dynamically personalizes the on-site experience without requiring brands to rebuild their infrastructure. Every interaction compounds: the system learns, adapts, and improves outcomes continuously.

The result: higher conversion, stronger retention, and a lasting edge for brands competing in a signal-scarce, AI-native world.

What You'll Do

• Define system architecture from first principles and own it end-to-end
• Build the initial product hands-on (this is a 0 to 1 role)
• Design and scale the decisioning and personalization engine across data, infra, and product layers
• Work directly with the founder on product direction and technical strategy
• Hire and lead the early engineering team as the company grows
• Communicate technical tradeoffs and system design to non-technical stakeholders in outcome-oriented terms

Who You Are

• A builder-leader at the intersection of AI, product, and real-time systems
• Experienced in high-stakes, fast-moving environments: vertical SaaS, applied ML, or personalization/recommendation systems
• Comfortable working across backend, frontend, and product, not siloed
• Strong product intuition alongside technical execution
• Thrives in ambiguity and early-stage building

Key Technical Responsibilities

• Decisioning and Personalization Architecture Design and scale the real-time scoring and routing engine: interpreting incomplete behavioral signals, making decisions under uncertainty, and serving personalized experiences with low latency.
• LLM and Agentic Systems Build and maintain AI agent layers using frameworks like LangGraph or PydanticAI, including modular reasoning pipelines (RAG, ReAct, planner-executor) for CRO automation and content decisioning.
• Data Infrastructure Integrate event-driven pipelines, vector databases (pgvector, Pinecone), and structured data stores to support real-time retrieval, persistent memory, and behavioral pattern recognition.
• Evaluation and Observability Build tools for trace inspection, confidence scoring, and output validation. Develop evaluation loops and test harnesses to ensure reliability and consistency across decisioning outputs.
• Engineering Architecture and Delivery Define technical standards, development processes, and system architecture to support a scalable, maintainable product. Partner with product leadership to translate strategy into roadmap.

Core Skills

• 5 to 7+ years of full-stack engineering experience
• Experience building real-time systems, data pipelines, or decisioning / recommendation engines
• Familiarity with LLM agent development and frameworks (LangGraph, PydanticAI, or similar)
• Production-level experience with FastAPI, Docker, and cloud-native deployment
• Comfort with vector databases and retrieval-augmented generation patterns
• Proficiency in agentic IDEs (Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code)

Bonus (not required)

• Experience in ecommerce, marketplaces, or personalization platforms
• Familiarity with event-driven or streaming architectures (Kafka, Kinesis)
• Shopify ecosystem knowledge

What This Is Not

• Not a pure infrastructure or platform role
• Not a maintenance or scaling role
• Not joining a large existing team

You will be building the foundation.

Why Join

• Significant equity + competitive cash
• True technical ownership: define the system architecture from day one
• Backed environment: venture studio with capital, operational support, and design partners already in market
• 0 to 1 opportunity: build a company, not just write code