Ethos BeathChapman
CTO, Applied AI
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Chief Technology Officer, AI Native Applications
A zero to one build, backed by $100 million in committed capital
Why This Role, Why Now
This is a rare opportunity to be the founding technology leader of a business built from day one with real capital behind it, no fundraising treadmill, no runway anxiety, and no legacy systems to untangle. You'd be joining at the earliest possible stage: prototype built, roadmap open, and a genuinely blank sheet on architecture, engineering culture, and team. Very few CTO seats offer this combination of a funded, de-risked start and full authority to build it your way.
About the Company
Over 5 billion people still manage their lives through basic applications, email, notes, tasks, calendar, none of which are AI native. Our client's mission is to build proactive applications for anyone in the world, including people who have never written a complex prompt in their life. The goal is to bring intelligence to conversations, errands, organising, and everyday workflows, with minimal to no prompting required.
The product is built around three core beliefs: agentic AI that completes multi-step tasks rather than just chatting, permissioned autonomy that asks before it acts, and persistent context that remembers what matters to each user over time. The team believes strongly that products like this should dramatically reduce hallucinations rather than compound them, and the ambition is simple: give people their time back to spend on what's actually meaningful.
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The business is incubated by a profitable, internationally established platform group, present across multiple markets in Asia and expanding into Europe, and is backed by an initial $100 million investment with additional capital available. It operates as a genuinely independent AI business within the group, not a side project.
About the Role
As CTO, you'll own technology strategy, architecture, and engineering standards across the Group. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone who wants to operate across multiple businesses while staying close to the systems, architecture, and execution, not a purely strategic seat removed from the work.
What You'll Be Doing
- Own architecture and the major technical decisions across the Group's products and platforms
- Review critical systems, architecture, infrastructure, and code directly, staying close enough to the detail to challenge it
- Set the engineering bar across reliability, security, performance, testing, and code quality from the ground up
- Identify technical debt and architecture constraints early, and drive their resolution before they become expensive
- Improve engineering productivity, development speed, and production reliability as the team scales
- Decide where technology and infrastructure should be shared across Group businesses
- Recruit and assess senior engineers, technical leads, and engineering leaders, building the founding technical team
What You'll Need
- A deep software engineering background, with real experience building and scaling production systems, not just architecting on paper
- Strong knowledge of backend systems, APIs, databases, cloud infrastructure, and distributed systems
- Experience making architecture decisions across multiple products or engineering teams
- Strong technical judgment and the confidence to challenge engineering decisions at implementation level, not just at a strategic level
- A track record of building world-class engineering teams from a standing start
- Genuine hands-on ability, comfortable reviewing code, architecture, incidents, and hard engineering problems directly, not delegating them away
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What Makes This Different
You won't inherit anyone else's technical debt, anyone else's hiring mistakes, or anyone else's architecture compromises. The capital is already committed, the mission is ambitious but concrete, and the parent group is profitable and self-funded rather than dependent on future rounds. This is as close to a true zero to one CTO mandate as exists in the market right now.
Compensation
Structured as cash plus equity, tailored individually with no fixed bands, reflecting the founding nature of the role. Equity is discussed case by case as part of the offer conversation.
How They Work
Remote first, with relocation support considered case by case. A small, high-talent density team that favours speed, ownership, and strong engineering fundamentals over process for its own sake.
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