Why This Role Stands Out
As a technical co-founder and CTO, you'll shape the future of an innovative AI advertising startup by owning the technical and research direction and building advanced systems that learn from creative work and its performance. This is a unique opportunity for a leader with experience in preference modeling and causal inference to drive significant impact and growth within a dynamic environment.
Quick Overview
Job Description
About the Role
Join an AI-powered creative advertising startup as a full-time technical co-founder and CTO. You will own the technical and research direction, building on an existing product to develop systems that learn from creative work and its real-world performance.
What You'll Do
Set the technical and research strategy, from current workflows through a proprietary training and evaluation platform.
Build data infrastructure connecting creative briefs, submissions, generation traces, decisions, feedback, and campaign outcomes.
Develop systems to evaluate, rank, critique, generate, and improve creative work.
Design allocation policies that direct campaign budgets and inform data collection.
Choose where to apply frontier models, fine-tuning, post-training, reinforcement learning, and original research.
Build reliable infrastructure for creator workflows, campaigns, experimentation, model training, and inference.
Set standards for data quality, consent, privacy, measurement, and model evaluation.
Recruit and lead the first engineering and research team, while working directly with creators and brands.
What We're Looking For
At least 3 years of relevant experience, with hands-on work building preference or reward models, including RLHF, ranking, or evaluation systems.
Experience with causal inference on observational data, such as selection bias, off-policy evaluation, counterfactual analysis, or adaptive experimentation.
A track record of shipping products used by people, building production ML infrastructure, and owning model, evaluation, or infrastructure programs end to end.
Background in ads, marketplaces, recommenders, or ranking systems tied to business outcomes, including experience with noisy, delayed, or subjective feedback.
Strong technical leadership and recruiting experience. Bandits, sequential allocation, multimodal systems, agents, or latent-variable modeling are valuable.
Ready to work full time, in person, as an equal co-founder in an early-stage environment.
Compensation & Benefits
Equity of approximately 28% as a co-founder. Cash compensation is discussed based on circumstances and fit. Visa sponsorship is not available.
Location
On-site in San Francisco, California.