Remote CTO — AI Platform & Scale Leader

Toptal; United States; Remote; USD 230,000 - 420,000; Full time

Job summary

Toptal is a global network-based company with a fully remote workforce. We seek a senior technology leader to drive AI and engineering strategy, own architectural decisions, and scale agentic engineering across platforms.

The role emphasizes building a high-impact, remote, globally distributed team, delivering measurable business outcomes, and aligning with executive leadership to advance AI maturity and capabilities.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's in CS/Engineering or related field; advanced degree preferred.
• 15+ years engineering leadership, including CTO/VP Engineering.
• Hands-on with modern AI engineering, foundation models, and agentic architectures.
• Experience scaling and modernizing large codebases, leading global remote teams.
• Outstanding communication, speed, ownership, and quality.

Responsibilities

• Own AI technology strategy, including model selection, fine-tuning, harness design, and cost control.
• Deploy agentic engineering at scale for matching, vetting, onboarding, delivery, and operations.
• Make AI quality measurable via evals, regression suites, and review loops.
• Rebuild platform building and operations to raise output per engineer.
• Decide team structure and own resourcing and workforce planning.
• Own platform architecture, throughput, reliability, and cost structure.
• Learn platform and model architecture in first week; align with CEO.
• Assess engineering function and AI maturity in first month; set strategy.
• Execute plan and stand up shared AI architecture in first three months.
• Show business impact in at least two workflows in six months; build leadership.
• Run advanced engineering org with AI leverage embedded in first year.

Skills

AI engineering

Engineering leadership

Remote team leadership

Communication

Education

Bachelor's in CS/Engineering

Advanced degree preferred

Job description

Toptal is a global network-based company with a fully remote workforce. We seek a senior technology leader to drive AI and engineering strategy, own architectural decisions, and scale agentic engineering across platforms.

The role emphasizes building a high-impact, remote, globally distributed team, delivering measurable business outcomes, and aligning with executive leadership to advance AI maturity and capabilities.