Chief Technology Officer - YC Startup

YouDevise; New York (NY); On-site; USD 250,000 - 500,000; Full time

Job summary

YouDevise is seeking a founder-level CTO to lead engineering for a YC-backed startup in New York City. You will own architecture, data infrastructure, and the forward-deployed engineering function delivering outcomes for customers and investors.

Ideal candidate has prior startup scale from 4 to 30 engineers, deep production AI/LLM experience, and a track record with enterprise customers. The role demands office presence in NYC, five days a week.

Qualifications

• Former founder or CTO with venture-backed startup experience.
• Deep experience building production AI/LLM systems, ideally agentic.
• Experience at the intersection of unstructured input and structured output: document AI, OCR, table extraction, schema mapping, evals.
• Track record delivering into demanding enterprise customers at high velocity.

Responsibilities

• Own engineering end-to-end: architecture and data infrastructure direction.
• Build out forward-deployed engineering for every customer engagement.
• Recruit and scale the engineering team beyond the current 4 engineers.
• Lead customer-facing technical conversations with CTOs, CISOs, and heads of engineering at top-tier firms.
• Partner with product co-founder on roadmap, prioritization, and build vs. buy decisions.
• Founder-level ownership: involved in sales, customer success, board discussions, and fundraising.

Skills

CTO/Founder experience

AI/LLM systems

Enterprise delivery

Team leadership

Customer-facing leadership

Tools

Palantir FDE

Scale FDE

RAG/Agentic tooling

OCR/document AI tooling

Job description

CTO leading a YC backed startup through a transformation to a forward deployed engineering model.

You will own engineering end to end:

Architecture. 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.

Forward-deployed engineering. Build out and lead the FDE function that runs every customer engagement. This is the muscle that delivers the outcomes our customers pay us for, and the reason we win against horizontal infrastructure.

Hiring. Recruit and scale the engineering team beyond the current 4 engineers. We have a strong inbound pipeline and clear conviction on who we 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, fundraising.

Key Requirements

Former founder or CTO. You've 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.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with forward-deployed engineering or solutions architecture motions (Palantir FDE, Scale FDE, Ramp Solutions, etc.).

Background scaling engineering teams from sub-10 to 30+.

Open source contributions to AI / LLM agent tooling.