Chief Technology Officer

Justworks, Inc.; New York (NY); Remote; USD 200.000 - 300.000; Vollzeit

Zusammenfassung

Vantage is seeking a Chief Technology Officer to lead the transition from an early AI product to a scalable production platform. You will own the architecture, engineering practices, model evaluation loops, and the operational controls that enable us to scale with confidence.

As the first engineering leader, you will decide what to build, recruit the team, and partner with the CEO, CCO, Head of Product, and COO.

Aufgaben

• Own technical strategy and architecture, including build and buy decisions that set our cost curve for the next three years.
• Build the engineering organization from zero: hiring plan, org design, levels, and the technical bar everyone is held to.
• Own the applied model layer: extraction, retrieval, evaluation, and the design decisions that keep the system grounded in sourced facts.
• Decide what to build, what to defer, and what risk to carry, and be able to explain each of those calls to people who will live with the consequences.
• Own software gross margin. Instrument cost per customer, report it monthly, and hold the line as the customer base grows.
• Own product security: environment isolation, access control, and the technical evidence behind our SOC 2, which our Chief Commercial Officer runs as a program.
• Own the technology behind the embedded bench: the agent systems, workflow tooling, and quality controls that determine how much an analyst can carry and how quickly a new customer comes online.
• Partner with services leadership on delivery model design, so that what we commit to customers and what the platform can support stay in the same place.
• Own infrastructure, operations, and third‑party platform dependencies.
• Represent Vantage technically in customer conversations, escalations, and diligence.
• Build AI-first internally, not only in the product. How we work should reflect what we sell.
• Set engineering practices and culture, including how much process is enough and where more of it would only slow us down.

Jobbeschreibung

Employment type Full-time employee Department — Work location Remote Compensation $200,000 – $300,000 annually
Final compensation will depend on the location and level at which the candidate is hired

About this job

VANTAGE

New York, NY

About Vantage

Vantage is an AI-native portfolio intelligence platform for institutional capital allocators: venture funds, private equity firms, fund-of-funds, LPs, and family offices. We pair software with an embedded bench of analysts and operators who work directly inside our customers’ portfolios, so firms get not software or services, but both. Every metric we surface is citation-grounded: traceable to its source document and page, a standard that legacy platforms and general-purpose AI tools cannot match.

Every number a GP reports to their LPs starts life inside a PDF. Today it gets from that PDF to the LP letter by way of an analyst, a spreadsheet, and a chain of copy-paste that nobody can audit and everybody trusts anyway. We replace that chain. We are pre-launch, with a private alpha cohort live today. We are launching this year, in a category that is fragmented at best and where nobody has yet built the AI-native version of it at scale.

About the role

As Chief Technology Officer you own the transition from an early AI product to a production platform: the architecture, the engineering practices, the model evaluation loops, and the operational controls that let us scale customer trust. You are the first engineering leader we will hire, and the decisions that set our cost structure, our security posture, and our shipping speed for the next three years are all still open, and all yours.

The platform is in production with customers today. The job extending it across many more firms, more documents, and more of the work our customers hand us, while the traceability holds and cost per customer falls. The judgment we care about is what to build in what order, and where to invest early in the things that compound, extraction accuracy, evaluation, and unit economics, so that growth is a matter of adding customers rather than adding effort.

Vantage sells software with an embedded bench alongside it, and that bench runs on what you build. Its leverage is set by the systems behind it, so designing that tooling is part of this job rather than an adjacent concern.

This is a startup job before it is anything else. Priorities move as we learn, and you will make consequential calls quickly and with incomplete information: what to build now, what to defer, and which risks are worth carrying. We want someone who has operated that way and can explain the thinking behind the calls they made, rather than someone whose strength is running an established process at a large company.

You will work directly with our CEO on strategy and roadmap, our Chief Commercial Officer on security and enterprise readiness, our Head of Product on what gets built, and our COO on the unit economics of running the platform. You will also be in front of customers. Allocators buy this category on trust, and their technical diligence is real.

The technical problem

Most AI products are graded on plausibility. This one is graded on traceability. That single difference sets the entire engineering agenda:

• Ingestion over unstructured, inconsistent source documents. Quarterly reporting packs, cap tables, K-1s, board decks, side letters, ILPA templates, and one-off Excel files that every firm formats differently and no firm formats consistently. There is no schema on the way in. There has to be one on the way out. This is the hardest thing we do.
• A provenance graph, not a citation footer. Every displayed figure resolves to a specific document and page. Derived figures show their derivation. This is load-bearing on the data model, and it holds or fails at runtime rather than in review.
• Correctness proven continuously. Every figure is grounded in a source, and the engineering work is proving that holds as the system scales: evaluation suites, runtime checks, and monitoring against the live platform. Our customers are regulated, so we surface sourced facts and leave recommendations and valuation opinions to them.
• Fleet operations across isolated customer environments. Contracted analysts work inside environments holding LP-confidential data, which is the right answer for this data and a standing engineering problem for everything else. Shipping a change, keeping behavior consistent, and getting real observability across all of those environments at once is the ongoing work.
• Tooling for the embedded bench. Alongside the platform, analysts and operators work inside customer environments on parts of the delivery. What they do by hand is work we have not yet built tooling for, and closing that distance is how onboarding gets faster and how each new customer costs less to serve than the last. The agent systems and internal tooling behind that work are part of this role.
• Unit economics at scale. What a customer pays is fixed by contract. What they use is not: every document ingested and every query run costs us more and earns us nothing. Inference and ingestion cost is a gross-margin problem from day one, and it is yours.

Responsibilities

• Own technical strategy and architecture, including the build and buy decisions that set our cost curve for the next three years.
• Build the engineering organization from zero: hiring plan, org design, levels, and the technical bar everyone is held to.
• Own the applied model layer: extraction, retrieval, evaluation, and the design decisions that keep the system grounded in sourced facts.
• Decide what to build, what to defer, and what risk to carry, and be able to explain each of those calls to people who will live with the consequences.
• Own software gross margin. Instrument cost per customer, report it monthly, and hold the line as the customer base grows.
• Own product security: environment isolation, access control, and the technical evidence behind our SOC 2, which our Chief Commercial Officer runs as a program.
• Own the technology behind the embedded bench: the agent systems, workflow tooling, and quality controls that determine how much an analyst can carry and how quickly a new customer comes online.
• Partner with services leadership on delivery model design, so that what we commit to customers and what the platform can support stay in the same place.
• Own infrastructure, operations, and third‑party platform dependencies.
• Represent Vantage technically in customer conversations, escalations, and diligence.
• Build AI-first internally, not only in the product. How we work should reflect what we sell.
• Set engineering practices and culture, including how much process is enough and where more of it would only slow us down.

The org you will build

You ship your org chart. Whatever structure you draw will show up in the product within two quarters, which is a liability at most companies and an advantage here, because there is nothing to unwind. The first architecture decision and the first org decision are the same decision, and both are open.

You may be a good fit if you have

• Operated where the ground was still moving. You have shipped without a finished spec, decided what to leave broken on purpose, and carried real risk knowingly. You can describe a call you made on bad information that worked out, and one that did not.
• Judgment about what to keep. You have inherited a system that mostly worked and decided correctly what to harden, what to replace, and what to leave alone. You know the difference between debt that is compounding and debt that is fine for now.
• Personally built a document extraction pipeline over messy real‑world documents and taken it to production accuracy. Not a demo, not a fine‑tune on a clean corpus. Production, with customers who noticed when it was wrong.
• Built internal tooling that changed what a team could do. You have taken work that ran on people and moved it onto software with people in the loop, and you can say what the throughput was before and after.
• Shipped an LLM‑backed product where being wrong was a business‑ending event, whether financial, legal, medical, regulated, or otherwise unforgiving, and can describe the mechanisms that made wrongness detectable. In our experience those are mostly tests, monitors, and runtime checks rather than clever prompting, and we would rather hear about the boring ones.
• A habit of defining the problem space rather than prescribing the solution. You tell engineers who the customer is and what has to be true, then let them find the answer. This is the competency we will probe hardest, because it determines whether the team we build outgrows you or not.
• Enough technical depth to earn the respect of every engineer you hire, and you still write code and read every pull request, and want to, for at least another year.
• A track record of execution estimates that turned out to be true. Headcount and compute spend both. You have been wrong about this before and can say what it cost and what you changed.
• The ability to explain deeply technical work to people who are not technical, whether that is an allocator’s operating partner, a compliance officer, or an investor, without condescension and without retreating into jargon.

Strong candidates may also have

• Private‑markets fluency: fund accounting, ILPA reporting, cap tables, capital account mechanics.
• Experience as the first or second engineering leader at a company that went on to scale.
• A working understanding of current practice in agents, evaluation frameworks, and retrieval systems.
• Enterprise B2B experience where human operators work inside customer environments.
• Time on the technical side of enterprise security diligence or a SOC 2. Useful context, not a requirement.

What we are explicitly not screening for

A prior CTO title. A PhD. Hyperscaler experience. A brand‑name logo. Total years of experience. Compliance certifications matter to our customers, but they are not what we are hiring you for. We are screening for evidence that you have solved this specific class of problem, and we will pressure‑test that evidence hard.

Not a fit if

• You need a mature platform, a defined process, and a finished spec to be effective.
• Your instinct on inheriting an imperfect system is to rewrite it.
• You want to run a research function.
• You need forty engineers before you can produce anything.
• Your strength is running a delivery process rather than understanding the product and the people building it.
• You want distance from customers. You will be in front of them in month one.

About the team

We are a small, senior team. Product, design, commercial, client success, and operations are in place and experienced, and most of us have built and sold software before. Engineering leadership is the gap, which is why this role exists and why it reports directly to the CEO. You will be in the room where decisions are made rather than in a function that receives them.

Compensation and benefits

Base $200,000 to $300,000

Logistics

Location. New York.

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

Vantage is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law. All employment decisions are based on qualifications, merit, and business need.