Chief AI Officer

Harnham; United States; Remote; USD 405,000 - 495,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Fully remote

Founding-executive equity

Job summary

Harnham is seeking a Chief AI Officer to lead the architecture of an enterprise AI platform. This fully remote, founder-backed role focuses on building agent runtimes, orchestration, and scalable cloud foundations at scale.

You will define the technical roadmap, recruit an elite team, and work closely with the founder on product strategy and long-term direction, staying hands-on through the formative stage of the company.

Qualifications

• Proven experience architecting and deploying production-grade agent runtimes.
• Ability to explain system design layer by layer.
• Strong foundations in distributed systems and scalable cloud infrastructure.
• 0-to-1 founder-level builder or executive leadership experience.
• Experience leading engineering teams while remaining technically hands-on.

Responsibilities

• Own core technical architecture across agent execution, orchestration, memory, and tool calling.
• Build enterprise-grade foundations for security, governance, observability.
• Set technical roadmap and recruit elite engineering team.
• Stay hands-on with architecture and critical technical decisions.
• Partner with founder on product strategy and long-term direction.

Skills

Agent runtimes

Distributed systems

Cloud infrastructure

Hands-on builder

Leadership experience

Entrepreneurial mindset

Job description

Chief AI Officer | Remote | Up to $450K base + equity

An enterprise AI platform is hiring a founding Chief AI Officer to architect the infrastructure that will let organisations run hundreds or thousands of AI agents reliably at scale. This is a deeply technical seat for someone who has built agent infrastructure themselves, partnering directly with an ambitious founder to shape the company from the ground up.

The Company

• Early-stage enterprise AI platform building the control plane for the agentic era
• Built on a “Private Intelligence” thesis: models are becoming interchangeable, while an enterprise’s proprietary data, context and institutional knowledge become the differentiated asset
• Founder-led, with a profitable sister business providing a live proving ground for the technology from day one
• Expanding from its marketing and advertising origins into a broad enterprise AI platform

The Role

• Own the core technical architecture across agent execution, orchestration, state management, persistent memory, context engineering, tool calling, model routing, concurrency and failure recovery
• Build enterprise-grade foundations across security, permissions, governance, observability and evaluation
• Set the technical roadmap and engineering philosophy, and recruit an elite engineering team
• Stay hands-on with architecture and critical technical decisions through the formative stage
• Partner directly with the founder on product strategy and long-term technical direction

What We’re Looking For

• Proven experience personally architecting and deploying production-grade agent runtimes, multi-agent orchestration frameworks or agentic infrastructure
• The ability to explain precisely how the systems you built work, layer by layer
• Deep foundations in distributed systems and scalable cloud infrastructure
• A genuine 0-to-1 builder background as a founding CTO, technical founder, AI infrastructure leader or Principal/Distinguished-level engineer ready for executive scope
• Experience leading and growing an engineering organisation while remaining technically involved
• Strong commercial and entrepreneurial instincts
• Industry background is open. Architectural depth is the priority.
• Please note: this role is not suited to leaders whose experience centres on overseeing GenAI initiatives, implementing RAG applications or integrating existing frameworks

What’s On Offer

• Up to $450K base plus founding-executive equity
• Fully remote
• The opportunity to define the technical direction of an enterprise AI platform from its foundations