Chief Technology Officer

Narratize; Cincinnati (OH); Hybrid; USD 230,000 - 320,000; Full time

Job summary

Narratize Inc. is a remote-first, Cincinnati-based company building an AI-native Product Portfolio Intelligence platform for manufacturers. We seek a Chief Technology Officer to shape technology strategy and translate emerging AI into commercial value for enterprise customers.

You will lead technical decision-making, collaborate with executives, and scale an ambitious product organization while ensuring security, governance, and operational excellence.

Qualifications

• Proven executive leader with enterprise software or AI product experience.
• Strong track record guiding cost-efficient, scalable tech in startups.
• Hands-on in architecture review and prototyping for AI systems.

Responsibilities

• Shape technology strategy and product direction.
• Collaborate with CEO, Product, and VP Eng to drive delivery.
• Win strategic enterprise customers and manage technical due diligence.
• Oversee security, governance, and platform resilience for scale.
• Mentor engineers and build high-performing teams.

Skills

Executive leadership

Enterprise SaaS

AI/ML strategy

Product knowledge

Stakeholder communication

Tools

AWS

Azure

Kubernetes

Job description

Build AI that manufacturers rely on to make strong product and portfolio decisions.

Narratize is changing that.

We're building an AI-native Product Portfolio Intelligence platform that helps manufacturers determine what to develop, where to invest, and how to advance innovation.

With enterprise customers and a substantial technical foundation in knowledge orchestration, intelligent agents, and connected workflows, our next challenge is clear: make sophisticated AI genuinely useful in the daily decisions of product teams. We're building compelling, trusted experiences that are easy to adopt, quick to implement, and valuable enough to become part of how manufacturers work.

We're seeking a Chief Technology Officer who can help lead that transformation. We're looking for a builder who thinks like an owner to scale an ambitious business, knows what it takes to turn emerging technology into commercially successful products, and thrives when resources are constrained and decisions matter. You can move fluently between shaping company strategy, working alongside engineers on difficult technical problems, and helping the CEO win transformational enterprise customers.

As a senior member of our executive team, you will connect the frontier of AI innovation to meaningful customer value and measurable commercial advantage.

What you'll do

You will make an impact across five dimensions:

• Make enterprise AI meaningfully better for customers. Stay close to emerging AI capabilities; decide which technical bets will create defensible differentiation. Combine governed enterprise knowledge, trustworthy agents, and dynamic workflows to help manufacturers accomplish critical work more effectively than general-purpose AI alternatives.
• Create a product experience customers depend on. Partner with Product and Engineering to turn powerful platform capabilities into intuitive, proactive experiences for real new-product-development and portfolio decisions. Work with the knowledge and permissions customers already have, reduce implementation friction, and measure time to first value, sustained usage, and business impact.
• Advance strategic enterprise opportunities. Personally help win our most important enterprise customers by establishing credibility with CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, and innovation executives. Lead technical discovery, navigate complex buying committees, articulate defensible differentiation, overcome security and architecture objections, and translate our platform's capabilities into compelling business outcomes. Take ownership of helping customers move from technical evaluation to purchase, adoption, and expansion.
• Multiply a lean, capable engineering organization. Work as a close partner to our cofounder and Chief Product Officer and our established VP of Engineering. Bring hands-on technical judgment, unblock hard problems, develop people, and improve engineering leverage, delivery speed, and quality while preserving clear day-to-day ownership of engineering execution.
• Own technology readiness for enterprise scale and the next stage of growth. Be accountable for technology strategy, platform resilience and scalability, enterprise security and governance, AI quality and economics, and major build-versus-buy choices. Partner with the CEO and CPO on strategy and the board, lead technical investor diligence, and support Series A readiness with evidence of customer outcomes.

What we're looking for

The executive we're looking for

You've personally built, launched, and commercialized enterprise software or AI products, ideally in a venture-backed or similarly entrepreneurial company serving demanding enterprise buyers. You combine deep technical judgment, commercial instincts, and the ability to make consequential decisions with limited time, capital, and engineering capacity.

You understand modern production AI deeply—including LLM applications, enterprise knowledge, retrieval, agents, evaluation, and emerging model capabilities—and have turned technically sophisticated systems into intuitive, reliable experiences that customers repeatedly use, trust, and pay for.

You've personally engaged enterprise CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, and business leaders in consequential technology decisions; helped resolve deployment objections and win business; and mentored engineers and engineering leaders. You can move from executive discussion to architecture review or prototype when the situation demands it.

You're entrepreneurial, intellectually curious, decisive, collaborative, and energized by building alongside founders. You challenge assumptions, spot opportunities early, and take personal pride in the success of customers and colleagues.

Experience building software for enterprise buyers in an early-stage or scaling company is strongly preferred; venture-backed experience is valuable. Manufacturing, industrial innovation, and enterprise product-development experience are advantages, not prerequisites.

Location: Narratize is a remote-first company headquartered in Greater Cincinnati. We strongly value in-person collaboration and welcome candidates interested in relocating to Cincinnati, with relocation incentives available. Relocation is not a requirement. We are equally committed to finding exceptional talent across Eastern and Central time zones, provided the leader can regularly collaborate with our team and travel to strategic enterprise customers when necessary.

Required qualifications

• Proven senior technology leadership in enterprise SaaS or AI, with accountability for production software, technology strategy, engineering talent, and delivery.
• Demonstrated success taking AI-powered products from initial technical capability through production deployment, customer activation, sustained adoption, and commercial expansion. Be prepared to explain the outcomes and your personal contribution.
• A record of personally leading enterprise technical discussions with CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, architects, and senior business buyers; recommending deployment architectures, resolving material security and integration concerns, and helping advance strategic revenue opportunities.
• Experience developing engineering leaders and working as an equal partner with Product, Sales, and Customer Success to translate user needs into sharply prioritized, shipped, measurable customer value.
• Proven judgment and hands-on contribution in lean teams: decisive prioritization, pragmatic build-versus-buy choices, working prototypes or technical investigations, and the right balance of speed, security, reliability, and scalability.
• Executive-level communication and conviction to challenge assumptions, explain tradeoffs, and represent technology strategy with customers, investors, and the board.

Technical expertise

• Production generative AI: LLM application architecture, model selection, context and prompt engineering, tool use, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agent orchestration, and intelligent workflow design.
• Enterprise knowledge systems: unstructured content ingestion, indexing, hybrid/semantic retrieval, metadata, knowledge provenance, and practical uses of vector or graph-based architectures.
• Secure enterprise integrations: API and connector design, synchronization, knowledge freshness, identity propagation, and permission-aware retrieval across customers' existing repositories. Microsoft 365/SharePoint experience is especially valuable.
• Enterprise security and governance: multi-tenant isolation, SSO (SAML/OIDC), OAuth, role- or attribute-based authorization, encryption, auditability, data protection, and SOC 2-aligned operational practices.
• AI evaluation and production quality: groundedness and answer quality, evaluation datasets and automated testing, observability/tracing, hallucination mitigation, human oversight, reliability, latency, and model cost.
• Modern cloud and software architecture: distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, APIs, data pipelines, CI/CD, scalability, operational resilience, and sound AI unit economics.
• Current AI landscape: ability to assess frontier and open models, agent frameworks, enterprise interoperability patterns (including MCP), and build/buy/partner choices against customer outcomes.
• Hands-on technical leadership: personally review architecture and code, prototype critical AI capabilities, diagnose hard production bottlenecks, and coach engineers. Make the existing VP of Engineering and team more effective through clear decision rights and meaningful technical contribution.

This is an opportunity to shape how the world's most innovative manufacturers make their most important product decisions—and to help build the company that makes it possible.

Help build the system of intelligence for NPD

Narratize is a remote-first team helping advanced manufacturers bring superior products to market faster. If this role fits, we'd like to hear from you.