Chief Technology Officer

AiLight; Greater London; Remote; GBP 80,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

AiLight is seeking a CTO Co-Founder to lead engineering efforts for an AI-first product startup. You'll work closely with experienced founders to build innovative tools that enhance product development. Ideal candidates will have a strong AI/ML background and engineering leadership experience, focusing on creating impactful solutions.

Qualifications

• Experience in scaling teams or systems.
• Strong background in AI/ML, ideally with LLMs.

Responsibilities

• Join as a technical counterpart to build an ambitious product.
• Attract and retain great engineers as the team grows.

Skills

Engineering leadership

AI/ML background

Product intuition

Hiring and team-building skills

Job description

CTO Co-Founder (AI-first product startup)

Location: Remote-friendly (UK/EU timezone overlap preferred)

Equity: Co-founder level

Stage: Early — pilots underway, tech foundation to be built

About Us

We’re building AiLight — a new kind of product development companion: AI-generated customer personas that integrate directly into tools like Figma, Jira, and Google Meet to give product teams instant, high-quality user feedback in real time.

Think: synthetic customers who can challenge your roadmap, comment on a wireframe, or simulate survey responses — all without having to schedule another user research session.

Our vision is to bring the market into the room every time a product decision is made. And we’re already seeing early signals that this is not just possible, but powerful. We’ve validated the core feasibility of generating high-fidelity personas that reflect real user behavior, and we’re preparing to go deeper with several early pilot partners.

Who You’ll Be Working With

You'll be joining forces with a founder who’s spent 13+ years building and leading product teams across startups, scale-ups, and big tech — including Yandex, Okko, and Qless. With deep domain expertise in product strategy and a strong network in the industry, we’re well-positioned to get early traction and iterate fast.

Now we’re looking for our technical counterpart — someone who sees the opportunity, shares the vision, and wants to build something ambitious from the ground up.

What We're Looking For

• Engineering leadership experience — you’ve scaled teams or systems before, and know how to balance speed with structure.
• Strong AI/ML background — ideally with experience using or fine-tuning LLMs, or at least working closely with them in production.
• Product intuition — you're excited about solving real problems, not just building for the sake of tech.
• Hiring and team-building skills — you can attract and retain great engineers as we grow.
• A personal connection to the mission — maybe you’ve felt the pain of guessing what users want, or building in a vacuum. You get why this matters.

Ideally UK/EU timezones for smoother collaboration, but we care more about mindset and chemistry than geography.

Bonus Points

• You've built developer tools, design tools, or products used by product managers, designers, or engineers.
• You enjoy ambiguity and know how to find momentum early.
• You're scrappy but think in systems.

If this sounds like the kind of problem you want to wake up thinking about — and the kind of partnership you want to build — we’d love to meet you. Let’s make products more human by making customers part of the process.