Chief Technology Officer

CTO - Hands-on Engineering

New York City | On-site

$300,000 + meaningful equity

If you want to know about the requirements for this role, read on for all the relevant information.

Albert Bow are supporting an early-stage start-up in NYC that is looking for a hands-on CTO to take ownership of its technology, lead engineering and help scale the business.

Our client is building an AI-powered product that connects contracts, documents, invoices and financial data to automate processes that remain heavily manual across large enterprises.

The product is already live, commercially proven and being used by major US customers. Now they’re looking for someone who can take the technology to the next stage, setting the technical direction while remaining deeply involved in the engineering.

The Opportunity

This is a hands-on CTO role, with a strong focus on engineering rather than traditional management.

You’ll work closely with the founders to shape the technical roadmap, make key architectural decisions and build the systems that underpin the product. You’ll also be expected to get into the code yourself, solving complex engineering problems and setting the standard for how software is built.

The team is still small, so this is an opportunity to have a direct impact on the product, the technology and the engineering culture as the business grows.

That means:

- Owning the technical vision, architecture and engineering roadmap.

- Remaining hands-on with coding, system design and technical problem-solving.

- Building and scaling production-grade AI systems, workflows and integrations.

- Developing LLM orchestration, RAG pipelines and evaluation frameworks.

- Solving complex problems around document processing, data extraction, search and retrieval.

- Designing reliable data pipelines and scalable, multi-tenant infrastructure.

- Making pragmatic decisions around performance, reliability, security and scalability.

- Working closely with the founders to align technical decisions with product and commercial priorities.

- Establishing engineering standards, development practices and a culture of high-quality execution.

- Building and leading the engineering team as the business grows.

- Working directly with customers and senior stakeholders when technical input is needed.

You’ll have real ownership of what gets built, how it gets built and how the engineering function evolves.

This isn't a role where you'll spend your time managing managers or sitting in meetings. The expectation is that you can lead the technical function while remaining one of its strongest engineers.

What We're Looking For

The job title matters less than the engineering experience behind it.

You might already be a CTO, a Founding Engineer, a Staff Engineer or a Principal Engineer who's ready to take full ownership of a company's technology.

What matters is that you've built and scaled real software, can make sound architectural decisions and still enjoy being hands-on.

We're looking for someone with:

- A strong software engineering background and a track record of building production systems.

- Experience in an early-stage or high-growth technology business.

- Strong system design and architectural decision-making skills.

- Experience building and deploying production-grade AI systems, beyond prototypes and proof of concepts.

- Practical knowledge of LLM orchestration, RAG, AI workflows and evaluation frameworks.

- Experience working with large volumes of structured and unstructured data.

- A strong understanding of enterprise software, including integrations, security, compliance and multi-tenancy.

- The ability to balance rapid development with reliability, maintainability and technical quality.

- Experience taking ownership of technical strategy while working closely with founders and customers.

- The ability and willingness to build, mentor and lead a high-performing engineering team.

From a technical perspective, experience across Node.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch and AWS/GCP would be highly relevant.

You don't need to tick every box. We're more interested in what you've actually built, the decisions you've made and the problems you've solved.

The Person

You'll be comfortable operating in an early-stage environment where priorities can change quickly and not every problem has an obvious answer.

You enjoy getting into the detail, challenging assumptions and finding straightforward solutions to complex problems. You can move between architecture,