CTO

About Settle
Settle is an AI-native enterprise data migration platform. We replace the manual schema mapping, transformation, and validation work that consulting firms do by hand today with an AI system built on a single principle: AI proposes, deterministic engines validate, humans approve.

About 90% of enterprise data maps cleanly. The other 10%, the edge cases buried in expert knowledge, is where migrations fail. That is the problem we are building for.

The opportunity
We're hiring the person who'll own the technical side of the company alongside the founder. CTO economics, CTO scope, full ownership of agent architecture, infrastructure, and engineering culture from day one.

If you've shipped LLM systems in production, care about correctness more than novelty, and want to build the system that makes enterprise data migration finally work, let's talk.

What you'll own

• Agent architecture and orchestration: design and ship the agent loop, decomposition strategy, eval harness, and validation pipeline. The next 3–6 months.
• Infrastructure: deployment, reliability, observability, cost. There is no DevOps team. You are the page.
• Engineering strategy: own technical direction, infrastructure decisions, and architectural choices as we scale.
• Enterprise security and compliance: be the technical face in customer security reviews and lead SOC 2 Type I, underway from August 2026.
• Hiring and team building: recruit and lead the engineering team as we grow from two to ten.
• Customer and product: partner with the founder on product strategy, talk directly to customers, and shape the roadmap.

This role is not for someone who wants to write code in isolation. It's for someone who wants to build a company.

Who you are
Must-have:

• 5–9 years of engineering experience, with 3+ years shipping production systems used by real customers
• Production LLM or agent system experience: has built and deployed applications using LLM APIs in production. Knows prompt engineering, structured outputs, retries, evaluation. Non-negotiable.
• Full-stack capability: comfortable owning both the product surface and the backend, not one layer
• Infrastructure ownership: has deployed, operated, and debugged production systems without a platform team behind them
• Strong backend and data fundamentals: Postgres at depth, schema design, SQL, async and queue patterns, idempotency
• TypeScript proficient. Our stack is Next.js App Router, Supabase and Postgres with RLS, the Anthropic API, and Vercel.
• Has shipped to paying customers, not just side projects

Strong preference:

• Time at a data infrastructure company: Snowflake, Databricks, Datadog, MongoDB, Fivetran, dbt Labs, Airbyte, Confluent, Supabase. You'll understand the problem viscerally.
• Background in data engineering, integration, migration, or ETL
• Enterprise SaaS instincts: already knows what SSO, RBAC, audit logs, and SOC 2 mean and why they matter
• Has built eval frameworks (Braintrust, Langfuse, or homegrown). The agent roadmap depends on this.
• Production cloud experience: has shipped and operated cloud-native applications in AWS, GCP, Azure, or modern PaaS

Cultural fit:

• Investigation-first: reads the code before changing it
• Comfortable presenting in enterprise security reviews
• High agency, can decide and ship without direction
• Direct communicator. Corporate-comms styles won't fit.
• Comfortable with startup pace. This is not a 9-to-5.

What we offer

• Title: CTO
• Equity: 5–10% common stock. 4-year vest, 1-year cliff. A real, earned path to co-founder for the person who operates at that level. Not promised, not pre-negotiated.
• Cash: $200K–$250K base. Starts at $200K, steps to $250K on close of the pre-seed round.
• Optional structure: part of equity can be milestone-based for upside alignment
• Location: NYC. In-person.
• Stage: Pre-seed closing, in the Antler NYC residency. Two customers live, enterprise contracts closing now with $500K+ in pipeline.
• Team: Kaan (founder and CEO, ex-Deloitte enterprise data migrations, second-time founder) and Alex (founding AI engineer, serial hackathon winner: first at Datadog's Self-Improving Agents hackathon, third at Mistral Worldwide).

Process
Screen, then a technical deep dive on your background and projects with Kaan and Alex, then references, and then a paid four-week work trial.

Questions before applying: [email protected]