CTO, AI Safety & Real-Time Compliance

Rectec Recruitment; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Rectec Recruitment is seeking a Chief Technology Officer for a stealth AI safety lab in San Francisco. You’ll own the technical vision, lead engineering, and build real-time guardrails for AI in production, starting with financial services.

You’ll hire and mentor 3–6 engineers in your first year, shape architecture with the founders, and ship hands-on code while guiding research directions in a fast-paced, high-agency environment.

Qualifications

• 5–10 years of experience as a CTO, Head of Engineering, or engineering leader.
• Experience building AI/LLM products and eval harnesses.
• Experience with agent RAG, forward-deployed work, or on-prem models.
• Builder-first co-founder profile, currently writing code and shipping.
• US work authorization (visa transfers acceptable).
• Experience at fast-paced companies (Ramp, Mercury, Kalshi, or Perplexity).

Responsibilities

• Build legal evaluations (RL environments) to measure AI’s failure modes in financial services.
• Productionize the research MVP into real-time guardrails for design partners.
• Set technical architecture and research direction alongside the founders.
• Hire and mentor engineers to grow the engineering team.
• Collaborate with design partners to iterate on needs while building core infrastructure.

Skills

Engineering leadership

CTO experience

AI/LLM product experience

RAG / agent tech

Infrastructure development

Code and shipping

US work authorization

Education

University degree

Tools

Evaluation environments

Training pipelines

Job description

Rectec Recruitment is seeking a Chief Technology Officer for a stealth AI safety lab in San Francisco. You’ll own the technical vision, lead engineering, and build real-time guardrails for AI in production, starting with financial services.

You’ll hire and mentor 3–6 engineers in your first year, shape architecture with the founders, and ship hands-on code while guiding research directions in a fast-paced, high-agency environment.