Founding CTO

kadence; New York (NY); On-site; USD 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Kadence is partnering with a leading investment firm to appoint a Founding CTO of a new enterprise AI company in New York. You will own the technical direction, develop the product into an enterprise-ready platform and build the founding engineering team.

New York is strongly preferred and an in-person approach is expected during the formative stages. This is a true technical co-founder role, reporting to the CEO and working closely with the incubation team.

Qualifications

• Experience building AI-native products and agentic systems.
• Strong architecture and engineering fundamentals for scalable systems.
• Ability to translate customer needs into technical solutions.
• Experience hiring and leading engineers at early stage.

Responsibilities

• Define technical architecture, product roadmap and engineering strategy.
• Build the product into a scalable enterprise platform while staying hands-on.
• Recruit and lead the founding engineering team.
• Work with design partners to translate workflows into technical solutions.

Skills

AI architecture

Engineering leadership

Product roadmap

Customer collaboration

Recruiting engineers

Job description

Confidential Search | Founding CTO | Enterprise AI | New York

Kadence is partnering with a leading investment firm to appoint the Founding CTO of a new enterprise agentic AI company.

The business is building a platform to help organizations understand how work is carried out, identify opportunities to improve and automate processes, and turn those insights into useful AI-enabled tools.

There is a working product and early customer interest. The CTO will take ownership of the technical direction, develop the product into an enterprise-ready platform and build the founding engineering team.

The opportunity

This is a true technical co‑founder role. Working closely with the founding CEO and incubation team, you will:

• Define the technical architecture, product roadmap and engineering strategy.
• Build and develop the product from its current stage into a scalable enterprise platform.
• Remain hands‑on during the early stages, particularly across the most important architectural and product decisions.
• Work directly with design partners to understand their workflows and translate real customer needs into technical solutions.
• Establish the approach to AI evaluation, security, privacy, reliability and enterprise deployment.
• Recruit and lead the early engineering team while creating a strong technical culture.

The technical challenge brings together applied AI, workflow intelligence, high-volume event data and automation. The platform will need to operate effectively within complex enterprise environments while handling sensitive workplace data in a secure and trusted way.

What we are looking for

We are looking for a deeply technical builder with the ambition and judgement to become a genuine co‑founder.

The strongest candidates are likely to bring a combination of:

• Experience building AI‑native products, agentic systems, developer tools, workflow platforms or enterprise automation products.
• Strong architecture and engineering fundamentals across scalable systems, data infrastructure and production AI.
• Experience with native or desktop applications, event‑driven systems, on‑device processing or other resource‑constrained environments.
• A track record of taking products from an early prototype into reliable production use.
• The ability to work closely with customers and translate ambiguous business problems into focused technical decisions.
• Experience hiring and leading engineers while remaining close to the product and code.
• Genuine appetite for the ownership, pace and ambiguity of a zero‑to‑one company.

New York is strongly preferred, with an in‑person approach expected during the formative stages of the business.