Field CTO

Alice; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Alice seeks a seasoned Field CTO to bridge frontier labs and enterprise buyers on the West Coast. You will translate frontier research into pilots, define technical scopes in client discussions, and align product direction with research priorities.

Based in the Bay Area, you will lead as the technical voice in meetings, build a vibrant frontier-lab community, and shape the field-to-strategy loop while collaborating with the CTO and cross-functional teams across time zones.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience as a Field CTO or related role.
• Strong literacy in AI Safety and LLM stacks for GTM conversations.
• Fluency in RL post-training data metrics and how buyers evaluate safety and model performance.
• Understanding how frontier labs buy from and work with vendors.
• Track record translating frontier research into customer pilots, technical wins, and revenue.
• Industry presence through public speaking, publications, or active participation in AI Safety consortiums.
• Comfort as a public technical voice.
• Bay Area base with a live network in the Valley AI and security community.
• Flexibility to work with different time zones.

Responsibilities

• Be the technical front line in the Bay Area, leading discovery to scoped engagements.
• Build frontier-lab community in the Valley with events.
• Close the field-to-strategy loop with the CTO and push next needle mover into the roadmap.
• Be a pillar to build around; help hire and carry the Alice name locally.

Job description

Alice sells to the frontier labs. Those conversations open as a technical question. You sit in the room, understand the lab's real system, and design the engagement.

The role will leverage the West Coast presence and engagement.

Key Responsibilities

1. Be the technical front line in the Bay Area

You are the Tier 1 technical voice in client meetings, RFPs and novel scopes. Take the deep discovery conversation, then convert it into a scope that research and delivery can execute.

You own the top and middle of the funnel. Create the conversation. Earn the technical win. Define the partnership. Sales owns the commercial close.

You will handle objections in live technical deep dives with elite engineering and research teams, without escalating every time.

2. Build the frontier-lab community in the Valley

Run small, high-signal events with post-training, safety and security leads from the labs. We run roughly ten Bay Area events a year, including closed sessions for our circle of experts.

Brand awareness is a by-product. The purpose is to learn what those teams need, in their language, and to set up the meetings that turn into clients.

Represent Alice where it matters: conferences, analyst briefings, technical talks, joint research.

3. Close the field-to-strategy loop

Carry market- signal back into the company and act on it. Work with the CTO to name the next needle mover before it shows up in an RFP, then push it into the roadmap.

You influence the AI Labs pod agenda, AI security research priorities, and product direction directly.

4. Be a pillar to build around

Set the terms for how Alice operates in the Valley. Be the key person on the ground. Interview for adjacent roles, help other departments hire here, and carry the Alice name locally.

Requirements

Must Have:

• 8+ relevant years of experience as a Field CTO or related positions.
• Strong technical literacy in AI Safety and LLM stacks to comfortably lead GTM conversations with frontier-lab research teams.
• Fluency in RL post-training data metrics and how buyers evaluate safety and model performance.
• Working knowledge of how frontier labs buy from and work with vendors.
• A track record translating frontier research into customer pilots, technical wins, and revenue.
• Industry presence through public speaking, publications, or active participation in top AI Safety consortiums.
• Comfort as a public technical voice.
• Bay Area base, with a live network in the Valley AI and security community.
• Flexibility to work with different time zones

Nice to Have:

• Prior time inside a frontier lab, a research organization, or a vendor selling into one.
• Experience being the first senior person on the ground in a new geography.

About Alice

Alice is a trust, safety, and security company built for the AI era. We safeguard the communicative technologies people use to create, collaborate, and interact- whether with each other or with machines.

In a world where AI has fundamentally changed the nature of risk, Alice provides end-to-end coverage across the entire AI lifecycle. We support frontier model labs, enterprises, and UGC platforms with a comprehensive suite of solutions: from model hardening evaluations and pre-deployment red-teaming to runtime guardrails and ongoing drift detection.

Alice is widely considered a global leader in online safety and AI security. We have some of the most forward-thinking and passionate minds in the world working to safeguard over 3 billion users across the largest AI and tech platforms.

If you're creative and driven to secure the future of AI, we want to hear from you!

About the Position

Alice sells to the frontier labs. Those conversations open as a technical question. You sit in the room, understand the lab's real system, and design the engagement.

The role will leverage the West Coast presence and engagement.

Key Responsibilities

1. Be the technical front line in the Bay Area

You are the Tier 1 technical voice in client meetings, RFPs and novel scopes. Take the deep discovery conversation, then convert it into a scope that research and delivery can execute.

You own the top and middle of the funnel. Create the conversation. Earn the technical win. Define the partnership. Sales owns the commercial close.

You will handle objections in live technical deep dives with elite engineering and research teams, without escalating every time.

2. Build the frontier-lab community in the Valley

Run small, high-signal events with post-training, safety and security leads from the labs. We run roughly ten Bay Area events a year, including closed sessions for our circle of experts.

Brand awareness is a by-product. The purpose is to learn what those teams need, in their language, and to set up the meetings that turn into clients.

Represent Alice where it matters: conferences, analyst briefings, technical talks, joint research.

3. Close the field-to-strategy loop

Carry market- signal back into the company and act on it. Work with the CTO to name the next needle mover before it shows up in an RFP, then push it into the roadmap.

You influence the AI Labs pod agenda, AI security research priorities, and product direction directly.

4. Be a pillar to build around

Set the terms for how Alice operates in the Valley. Be the key person on the ground. Interview for adjacent roles, help other departments hire here, and carry the Alice name locally.

Requirements

Must Have:

• 8+ relevant years of experience as a Field CTO or related positions.
• Strong technical literacy in AI Safety and LLM stacks to comfortably lead GTM conversations with frontier-lab research teams.
• Fluency in RL post-training data metrics and how buyers evaluate safety and model performance.
• Working knowledge of how frontier labs buy from and work with vendors.
• A track record translating frontier research into customer pilots, technical wins, and revenue.
• Industry presence through public speaking, publications, or active participation in top AI Safety consortiums.
• Comfort as a public technical voice.
• Bay Area base, with a live network in the Valley AI and security community.
• Flexibility to work with different time zones

Nice to Have:

• Prior time inside a frontier lab, a research organization, or a vendor selling into one.
• Experience being the first senior person on the ground in a new geography.

About Alice

THE CHALLENGES ALONG THE WAY

1. Being Both Strategist and Executioner

One of the hardest parts of this role is that you’re both the visionary and the builder; the one drawing the mapandpaving the road.
That means switching between high-level strategy and hands-on experimentation daily, and doing it while bringing others along with you. There’s no playbook for this kind of work. You’re paving an unpaved road, one small experiment at a time.

2. Balancing Security and Innovation

ActiveFence is the leading provider of security and safety solutions for online experiences, safeguarding more than 3 billion users, top foundation models, and the world’s largest enterprises and tech platforms every day.
As a trusted ally to major technology firms and Fortune 500 brands that build user-generated and GenAI products, ActiveFence empowers security, AI, and policy teams with low-latency Real-Time Guardrails and a continuous Red Teaming program that pressure-tests systems with adversarial prompts and emerging threat techniques. Powered by deep threat intelligence, unmatched harmful-content detection, and coverage of 117+ languages, ActiveFence enables organizations to deliver engaging and trustworthy experiences at global scale while operating safely and responsibly across all threat landscapes.