Co-Founder & CTO

ABOUT THE ROLE This is an equal co-founder opportunity, not a conventional senior hire. You will own all technical and research strategy at an early-stage creative AI marketplace, joining at the ground floor with meaningful equity and full responsibility for shaping the product, the data infrastructure, and the research roadmap. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Own technical and research strategy end to end, from current workflows to a proprietary training and evaluation platform for creative AI agents. - Build data infrastructure that connects briefs, creator submissions, generation traces, decisions, critique, and campaign outcomes. - Design systems that evaluate, rank, critique, generate, and continuously improve creative work. - Develop the allocation policy that directs campaign budget and simultaneously shapes dataset collection. - Make core decisions on frontier model usage, fine-tuning, post-training, reinforcement learning, and original research directions. - Set standards for data quality, consent, privacy, measurement, and model evaluation. - Recruit and lead the first engineering and research team. - Work directly with creators, brands, and investors. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - Hands-on experience building preference or reward models, including RLHF, reward modeling, ranking subjective outputs, or evaluation systems. - Comfort with causal inference on observational data: selection bias, off-policy or counterfactual evaluation, adaptive experimentation, or validating cheap proxies against delayed outcomes. - Production ML experience in ads, marketplace, recommender, or ranking systems tied to real business outcomes. - Experience with bandits, sequential allocation, or online experimentation at scale. - A track record of shipping real products or features used by real people, not only research prototypes. - Experience owning a model, evaluation, or infrastructure program end to end. - Experience recruiting and leading strong technical teams. - Background at a frontier AI lab or research organization of comparable caliber is a strong signal. - Multimodal generation, agents, planning systems, or latent-variable modeling experience is valued. - Prior founder experience, including ventures that have since ended, is a plus. - High agency, intellectual honesty, low ego, and genuine curiosity about creativity and human feedback. - Able to commit full-time, in person in San Francisco, as an equal co-founder. COMPENSATION & BENEFITS - Equity: approximately 28% as an equal co-founder - Cash compensation: discussed directly based on circumstances and fit LOCATION On-site, full-time in San Francisco, California, United States.