Stealth Startup
Founding CTO / Co-Founder — European AI Infrastructure Startup
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We’re building a European AI infrastructure company focused on making enterprise AI adoption more controllable, efficient, and sovereign.
The product is already beyond the idea stage, with an initial platform and technical foundation in place. We’re now looking for a Founding CTO / Co-Founder who wants to help turn it into a category-defining company.
This is not a traditional CTO hire. It is a genuine co-founder opportunity with meaningful ownership, shared risk, and long-term responsibility for the company.
About the company
We’re building infrastructure for companies running AI models, agents, and tools in production. The platform sits between applications and AI providers, giving engineering teams a unified layer for areas such as model access, routing, governance, cost control, observability, security, and enterprise AI operations.
A core part of our vision is building AI infrastructure for the European market, with strong emphasis on sovereignty, openness, interoperability, and enterprise requirements.
The company was founded by an experienced software engineer with 10+ years of experience building software, cloud-native infrastructure, and AI platforms, including hands-on experience helping scale an earlier startup from a small local company into an international business.
The initial product and architecture already exist. We are now moving toward the next stage: customer adoption, design partnerships, fundraising, and building the founding team.
What we're looking for
We’re looking for someone who wants to become a founder, not simply take another senior engineering position.
As Founding CTO, you would gradually take ownership of the technology and engineering organization while working closely with the CEO on product direction, strategy, customers, and company building.
You would be involved in areas including:
- Technical and architectural direction
- Product and engineering strategy
- Building and evolving the core platform
- Making pragmatic infrastructure and scalability decisions
- Security, reliability, and enterprise readiness
- Building the future engineering organization
- Technical conversations with customers and partners
- Supporting fundraising and technical due diligence
- Challenging product and company decisions when you believe there is a better path
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You do not need to match the current technology stack perfectly. Strong engineering judgment, ownership, adaptability, and the ability to make good architectural decisions matter more than experience with any specific framework or language.
Who you might be
You’re probably a senior engineer, Staff/Principal Engineer, engineering leader, architect, or CTO who has reached the point where you want to build something you genuinely own.
You should be comfortable operating without a large team, established processes, or perfect information.
You enjoy going from architecture discussions to implementation when necessary.
You care about building technically strong products but also understand that successful companies require customers, speed, prioritization, and commercial judgment.
Experience in some of the following areas would be valuable:
- Distributed systems and cloud infrastructure
- Developer platforms or infrastructure products
- AI/LLM infrastructure
- APIs and high-performance backend systems
- Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies
- Security, governance, or enterprise software
- Open-source software
More importantly, you should have the ambition to build a significant technology company.
Founder commitment
The company is currently pre-funding / early-revenue stage.
Neither founder will draw a salary from the company during this stage. Both founders are expected to finance their own living expenses while investing meaningful time into building the business.
We understand that this may require maintaining another source of income initially. Immediate full-time availability is therefore not a requirement.
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What matters is meaningful and consistent founder-level commitment, with the intention for both founders to transition full-time once funding or sufficient revenue makes that sustainable.
This should not be treated as a small side project.
Compensation and ownership
This is a co-founder position, not an employee role.
There is no salary during the initial pre-funding stage.
Instead, the role comes with meaningful founder-level equity, reflecting the responsibility, risk, and long-term contribution expected from a true co-founder.
The exact equity split will depend on experience, commitment, responsibilities, and overall founder fit.
Founder equity would be subject to appropriate vesting to protect both sides and the long-term interests of the company.
Once the company raises external funding or reaches sufficient recurring revenue, the intention is for both founders to receive sustainable salaries and work on the company full-time.
What you're joining
You would not be joining someone with only an idea and a slide deck.
There is already a working product direction, technical foundation, incorporated company, market positioning, and active work toward early customers and design partnerships.
At the same time, the company is still early enough that you would have substantial influence over the product, architecture, engineering culture, strategy, and ultimately the company itself.
You would be joining as a partner in building the company from this stage onward.
Interested?
Rather than sending a traditional cover letter, tell us briefly:
- What is the most significant system, product, or engineering organization you have built or owned?
- Why are you interested in becoming a founder rather than taking another senior engineering role?
- What would you need to see in an early-stage startup before committing to it as a co-founder?
If there seems to be a strong fit, the next step will be an informal founder conversation rather than a traditional job interview.
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