Field CTO

Space Executive; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 230,000 - 340,000; Full time

Job summary

Space Executive seeks a Field CTO – AI Security for the San Francisco Bay Area. You will lead strategic technical conversations with top AI labs and partners, shaping partnerships and roadmaps from first discussions through delivery.

You'll anchor the West Coast presence, recruit and mentor regional teams, and translate market insights into product strategy while representing the company at conferences and in industry forums.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in senior solutions or technical architecture leadership.
• Strong expertise in securing AI systems end to end (agentic architectures, tool use, data pipelines, guardrails, testing).
• Understanding of how leading AI developers evaluate, procure and collaborate with external partners.
• Proven track record turning research into commercial products and revenue.
• Credibility with top-tier AI researchers.
• Public-facing technical speaker with presence in the field.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical engagement with strategic accounts in the AI safety/security space.
• Serve as senior technical authority in customer meetings, proposals and early engagements.
• Run discovery with customers and translate insights into defined programmes for delivery teams.
• Shape partnerships and pipeline by opening doors and building technical confidence.

Skills

Senior leadership

AI security

West Coast market

Public speaking

Strategic engagement

Job description

Field CTO – AI Security (San Francisco Bay Area)

About the Role

Our client is a well-funded AI safety and security company whose customers include the world's leading foundation model developers. Engagements with these organisations usually begin as deep technical conversations rather than sales pitches. In this role you'll be the person leading those conversations. You'll get to know how each lab's systems actually work, and you'll shape the partnerships that come out of that understanding.

This is a senior, highly visible hire. You'll anchor the company's growing presence on the US West Coast.

What You'll Do

Lead technical engagement with strategic accounts

• Act as the senior technical authority in customer meetings, proposals and first-of-their-kind engagements.
• Run in-depth discovery with customers and turn what you learn into well-defined programmes that the research and delivery teams can carry out.
• Drive early and mid-stage pipeline: open doors, win technical confidence and shape each partnership, while the commercial team handles contracting.
• Hold your own in live technical discussions with world-class research and engineering teams, and resolve challenges yourself without leaning on headquarters.

Grow a trusted network across the AI research community

• Host a regular programme of small, invitation-only gatherings for leaders working on post-training, alignment and model security.
• Use these sessions to understand customer priorities in their own terms and to create introductions that lead to new business. Visibility is a welcome side effect, not the aim.
• Represent the company at industry conferences, analyst briefings, technical talks and collaborative research initiatives.

Connect customer insight to company strategy

• Bring market intelligence back to the leadership team and make sure it changes what the company does.
• Partner with the CTO to spot emerging opportunities before customers ask for them, and turn those insights into roadmap priorities.
• Have direct influence over research focus areas, security research direction and product strategy.

Build the West Coast foundation

• Define how the company operates in the Bay Area and be its senior representative locally.
• Support hiring across functions as the regional team grows, and act as an ambassador for the business in the local ecosystem.

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years in senior solutions or technical architecture leadership, ideally at Principal level or equivalent.
• Strong, current expertise in securing AI systems end to end. This covers agentic architectures, tool use, orchestration, data pipelines, guardrails, adversarial testing and evaluation. Expertise limited to models alone won't be sufficient.
• An understanding of how leading AI developers evaluate, procure and collaborate with external partners.
• A proven record of turning research into commercial products and meaningful revenue.
• Credibility with top-tier AI researchers.
• Confidence as a public-facing technical speaker.
• Based in the Bay Area, with an active network across the AI and security communities.
• Comfortable working with a distributed team across significant time-zone differences.
• Hands-on experience with reinforcement learning-based post-training, preference optimisation methods, agentic environments or evaluation framework design.
• Previous experience at a leading AI lab or research institution, or at a company that partners closely with one.
• Experience as the first senior hire establishing a company's presence in a new region.