Chief Technology Officer

Shields Group Search; New York (NY); On-site; USD 150,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Shields Group Search seeks a Chief Technology Officer for a YC-backed startup in New York City, focusing on engineering leadership and technical direction. The ideal candidate will own engineering end-to-end, leading and scaling an agile team while engaging with top-tier investment firms.

This role requires deep AI experience and a strong customer-facing presence to drive outcomes. Join a growing team that has quickly achieved significant financial milestones.

Qualifications

• Proven ability to scale engineering teams from 4 to 30 engineers.
• Track record of high-velocity deliveries into demanding enterprise clients.
• Comfortable operating at the intersection of unstructured input and structured output.

Responsibilities

• Own engineering end-to-end, setting technical direction for the platform and data infrastructure.
• Lead customer engagement through the FDE function to deliver outcomes.
• Partner with key stakeholders on integrations and security.

Skills

Deep experience building production AI / LLM systems

Experience as a former founder or CTO

Comfort with document AI, OCR, and table extraction

Strong customer-facing technical leadership

Job description

Chief Technology Officer | YC-Backed Startup | NYC In-Office

Shields Group Search is partnering with a YC-backed startup hiring a Chief Technology Officer to join full-time in New York City. This is a rare opportunity to step into a founder-level technical leadership role at a fast-growing, capital-efficient AI company working with some of the largest investment firms in the world.

About the Company

Our client partners with the largest investment firms in the world and their portfolio companies to get their data ready for agents.

They have grown from $0 to $1.2M in ARR in 11 months and are moving from a pure-product motion to a forward‑deployed engineering model.

For example, they help a large software PE portfolio company structure the data trapped in their contracts, including pricing, renewals, and change‑of‑control terms, into clean form for M&A data migrations. What used to take a services team months now takes their agents days.

Every large enterprise is racing to put Claude, GPT, and other frontier models on top of their data. The bottleneck is no longer the model. It is the data underneath.

No off‑the‑shelf product reads enterprise documents end‑to‑end with the accuracy regulated workflows demand. Tables span pages. Formats vary by counterparty. OCR is unreliable. Audit and compliance teams need cell‑level provenance.

This is not a self‑serve doc parser. Their forward‑deployed engineers embed with each customer, configure agents to their specific data and workflows, and own the outcome end‑to‑end. The work is harder, the relationships are deeper, and the moat compounds with every workbook they deliver.

Investment Firms

PE and credit fund accounting teams, fund administrators, KPOs, and deal teams at investment banks.

Use cases include:

• Subscription doc and K‑1 processing

PE firms own hundreds of operating companies and are under intense pressure to deliver AI‑led value creation across them.

Use cases include:

• Contract structuring
• ERP cutovers

Company Snapshot

• YC‑backed
• $0 to $1.2M ARR in 11 months
• Last round priced at a $40M cap
• Lean team of 8 in NYC
• Capital‑efficient and growing fast

The founding CTO built the technical foundation that got the company here and is moving on to his next chapter. The company is now hiring his successor to scale the engineering org from here.

The Role

You will own engineering end‑to‑end.

• Set the technical direction for the agentic platform and the data infrastructure underneath. Drive the hard problems: high‑accuracy extraction at scale, evals, schema mapping, agentic orchestration, and the data plumbing into customer systems of record.
• Build out and lead the FDE function that runs every customer engagement. This is the muscle that delivers the outcomes customers pay for, and the reason the company wins against horizontal infrastructure.

Hiring

• Recruit and scale the engineering team beyond the current 4 engineers. The company has a strong inbound pipeline and clear conviction on who they want.

Customer‑Facing Technical Leadership

• Work directly with CTOs, CISOs, and heads of engineering at top‑tier investment firms, plus CFOs and operations leaders at portfolio companies, on integrations, security reviews, and SOC 2 commitments.

Product Partnership

• Partner with the product co‑founder on roadmap, prioritization, and the build vs. buy calls that matter.

Founder‑Level Ownership

• Sit in every important conversation: sales, customer success, board, and fundraising.

What They Are Looking For

• Former founder or CTO
• You have built and run a venture‑backed startup before, ideally one that scaled. You know what it takes to go from 4 engineers to 30, and what it takes to be the technical face of the company in front of customers and investors.
• Deep experience building production AI / LLM systems
• Ideally agentic systems with high accuracy bars, not just RAG.
• Comfort operating at the intersection of unstructured input and structured output
• Document AI, OCR, table extraction, schema mapping, evals, and the harness that holds it all together.
• Track record of delivering into demanding enterprise customers at high velocity
• Willing to be in the office 5 days a week in NYC

Bonus Experience

• Experience with forward‑deployed engineering or solutions architecture motions, such as Palantir FDE, Scale FDE, Ramp Solutions, etc.
• Background scaling engineering teams from sub‑10 to 30+
• Open source contributions to AI / LLM agent tooling