Chief Technology Officer

Harnham; United States; On-site; USD 250,000 - 450,000; Full time

Job summary

Harnham is seeking an exceptional Chief Technology Officer to lead the creation of an enterprise-grade agentic AI platform. You will work directly with the CEO, remain hands-on with architecture and engineering, and recruit a world-class engineering organization to build a category-defining platform.

This non-traditional CTO role emphasizes deep technical engagement, architectural decisions, and guiding the company through a pivotal growth phase while balancing ambiguity with ownership.

Qualifications

• Experience building agentic AI platforms
• Strong software engineering fundamentals and systems design
• Expertise in distributed systems and cloud-native infra

Responsibilities

• Define the technical vision and engineering strategy for an enterprise AI platform.
• Architect and oversee agent runtimes, orchestration, state, memory, tools and multi-agent workflows.
• Lead recruitment and development of world-class engineers; shape the engineering organization.
• Collaborate with the CEO and product leadership to define the platform roadmap.

Job description

Executive Leadership | Enterprise AI | Agentic Systems | 0→1 Platform Build

We are partnering exclusively with an early-stage AI company to appoint a Chief Technology Officer for one of the most ambitious enterprise agentic platforms we have encountered.

The company has spent several years developing its underlying technology and is now entering a pivotal stage of expansion.

The thesis is straightforward but enormous:

As enterprises move from copilots to hundreds or thousands of autonomous agents performing real work, they will require an independent infrastructure layer to orchestrate those agents, connect them securely to proprietary intelligence and tools, govern their behavior, and operate across an increasingly fragmented ecosystem of models and compute.

This company intends to build that layer.

We are looking for an exceptional technical builder, architect and engineering leader to work directly alongside the CEO and help define what that platform becomes.

This is not a traditional management-oriented CTO appointment.

The successful individual will remain deeply engaged with architecture and engineering while building an exceptional technical organization around them. You should be equally comfortable debating the architecture of an agent runtime, whiteboarding a distributed system, reviewing critical technical decisions and recruiting world-class engineers.

What You'll Own

• Technical vision, architecture and engineering strategy for an enterprise-grade agentic AI platform
• Architecture spanning agent runtimes/harnesses, orchestration, state/context, memory, tools/actions, multi-agent systems and human-in-the-loop workflows
• Model abstraction and routing across frontier, open-source, specialized and private models
• Enterprise intelligence/context infrastructure and secure access to proprietary data
• Agent evaluation, observability, guardrails, permissions, reliability and failure recovery
• Cloud-native and distributed infrastructure capable of supporting sophisticated production agent workloads
• Technical roadmap alongside the CEO, Product and commercial leadership
• Recruitment and development of a world-class engineering organization
• The transition from an already substantial technical foundation into a category-defining enterprise platform

What We're Looking For

You are likely a CTO, technical founder, VP Engineering, Head of AI/Engineering or exceptional senior technical leader who has already built sophisticated AI/platform technology.

Most importantly, you have actually built agentic systems.

We're interested in people who can go significantly deeper than saying their organization uses LangChain, LangGraph, MCP or an LLM API. You understand the underlying abstractions: how agents reason and execute, how state persists, how tools are exposed, how context is managed, how multiple agents coordinate, how failures are contained, how systems are evaluated and how the entire architecture operates reliably in production.

You will ideally bring:

• Exceptional software engineering and computer systems fundamentals
• Deep production experience with agentic AI / LLM systems
• Agent orchestration, runtimes or harness architecture
• Distributed systems and platform/infrastructure engineering
• Python, Go, Rust and/or TypeScript depth
• Cloud-native architecture, Kubernetes and modern infrastructure
• Production experience around tools, state, memory, context, evals and observability
• Experience taking complex technology from 0→1 and subsequently scaling it
• Evidence of building and attracting exceptional engineering teams
• Strong product instincts and an ability to translate an ambitious technical thesis into something enterprises can actually deploy
• Comfort operating with significant ambiguity, autonomy and ownership

Experience with coding agents, autonomous software development, enterprise AI infrastructure, model routing, AI gateways/control planes, MCP/A2A, RAG/context infrastructure, inference infrastructure or AI developer platforms would be particularly interesting.

Why This Opportunity?

This is an opportunity to join before the category has been fully defined, not after.

You won't inherit a mature roadmap and simply manage its execution. You'll have the opportunity to help determine the architecture, technical philosophy, product boundaries and engineering organization of a company pursuing a much larger question:

If AI agents become a new enterprise workforce, what infrastructure will enterprises need to own, control and govern that intelligence?

The CEO is an exceptionally ambitious founder looking for a genuine technical counterpart, not simply an engineering manager.

There is substantial ownership, direct influence over company strategy and the opportunity to build at the intersection of agents, enterprise intelligence, models, governance and AI infrastructure.

We are moving quickly and will be deliberately selective.

If you have built sophisticated agentic systems and believe the next generation of enterprise software will be fundamentally agent-driven, I'd like to hear from you.