Group Chief Technology Officer

Group Chief Technology Officer
Ideawise · Remote-first, Europe (CET)

Own the technology of every company we build — including the ones that don't exist yet.

About Ideawise
Most companies build a product. We build companies.
Ideawise is a venture builder: we fund, build and govern ventures from one shared machine — the operating system, service layer and AI platform every new company inherits on day one instead of spending its first year rebuilding. We hold equity in what we build, and the machine already pays for itself: an eight-figure-revenue, profitable portfolio, years in production. ~150 people. Hubs in Berlin, Barcelona and Shanghai.
You would not work on any one of our companies. You would work on the machine that builds them.
And one claim worth testing before you read further, because everyone makes it and almost nobody can show it: our own leadership function runs on an AI-native operating layer in production — planning, delivery tracking and decisions run through agents, today. That layer is now being spun out as its own company. You would inherit the proof, not build the case for it.

The role
We are hiring our first Group CTO. Nobody has held this seat, and it was built to be held once.
A company built inside Ideawise is technical from the morning it exists. It doesn't choose a stack, stand up infrastructure, or spend a year earning its way to production — it inherits all of that on day one: a spine already running, already proven, with real revenue flowing across it. That spine is what you forge — the machine that turns an idea into a shipping company in months, then does it again, faster.
That is the next phase of this company: a factory. And a factory needs a single technical authority at group level — one seat that owns the platform every venture inherits, the architecture and standards they build on, and the technical organisation behind all of it.
The seat carries technical authority above every C-level technical leader in the group and its ventures. You report to the COO. Technical calls stop with you.
And it grows in the direction that matters. As the portfolio scales, each venture gets its own CTO — and you hire them, set their bar, and lead them. You are not inheriting the technical leadership layer of a venture portfolio. You are the one who gets to build it.
This is a technology mandate, not a product one. The venture teams build the products. Your surface is the spine — and, increasingly, the people running technology on top of it.

What you'll own
The shared platform — infrastructure, data, agentic tooling and guardrails: the thing a new venture inherits on day one instead of choosing its own stack, and the reason our fifth company launches faster than our third.
The technical organisation, and then its leaders — you design the org on purpose: named leads, a written hiring bar, the authority to shape it. Then the venture CTOs: your hires, your bar, your bench.
Architecture, standards and build-vs-buy across every venture and service — including where LLM and agentic features get bought, built, or refused.
The decisions. Architecture, technical standards, build-vs-buy, the platform roadmap, and who joins the technical org. You are constrained by group capital allocation and by the regulatory limits below — which are real and not negotiable. The COO backs you.

What's true eighteen months in
Every venture ships on one shared platform for the things they would otherwise each rebuild — and the next one inherits it on day one.
The technical org runs on intent: named leads, a written bar, and at least two hires nobody here could have landed before you arrived.
Something is in production that the market would call hard, and that engineers here point at when they explain why they joined.
The first venture CTO is in seat, hired by you, and the bar they were held to is written down.

Where we operate
Part of our portfolio is regulated consumer platforms. For this seat that is an engineering frontier, not a compliance footnote: age verification, content moderation, trust & safety infrastructure and CSAM-safe design are core architecture problems here, and models that process user data are self-hosted before they touch it. Add EU AI Act and GDPR obligations at group level.
If that reads as the most technically interesting thing in this ad, we should talk.

What you'll bring
Shipped work that settles the question of whether you're good enough — engineers here will test you on the work in your first week, not on your title.
Technical authority held across organisations you did not directly manage — group, portfolio or multi-company scope, where standards had to be adopted rather than imposed. This seat sits above other technical leaders. That is a different skill from running one org well.
A shared platform you actually stood up — built or consolidated, adopted by teams who had alternatives, and still running after you left.
Production AI depth, not proximity to it — LLM or agentic systems in front of real users, real build-vs-buy calls, inference cost managed at scale, and at least one model-safety incident you owned.
Senior engineering leaders you hired and grew, whose teams outlasted you. You will be hiring people to do a version of your own job.

What we offer
A seat with no precedent and no ceiling. First Group CTO, consolidated technical authority, and a portfolio that compounds: what you forge becomes the default for every company we launch next — and the CTOs of those companies are your hires.
Something already running to own. A live platform, a real technical organisation, real revenue underneath, and an agentic operating layer in production.
Range most CTO seats don't have. Architecture and org design in the same week, across a portfolio rather than a product — and the frontier problems that come with running AI inside a regulated consumer estate.
Direct line to group executive leadership, and a voice in the operating model you execute.
Remote-first, Europe — CET hours, hubs in Berlin and Barcelona, real working overlap with Shanghai. Permanent, full-time.
Compensation discussed openly in the first conversation, including participation.

How to apply
Send two things: your CV, and a cover letter written for us.

The letter is what we read first, and it is deliberately unconstrained — any form, any length, any medium. A letter. A memo. A teardown of something we've shipped. An architecture diagram with opinions attached. A working prototype. Conventional is permitted; it is rarely what gets remembered.
And we are not going to pretend about the tool on your desk. We work AI-natively, so use one. What you can get out of a model is a skill we hire for at this level — so treat this as the first place to show it rather than something to hide. We are not interested in whether a model helped. We are interested in what you were able to make it do.

If you want a starting point, this is what we're actually curious about:

• A technical estate you unified: what was divergent, what you standardised, and what you failed to standardise.
• A shared platform you built that other teams adopted when they had the option not to. How did adoption actually happen?
• An AI system you put in front of real users: the build-vs-buy call, what it cost to run, and what went wrong.
• A technical leader you hired who turned out better than you expected. What did you see that their CV didn't show? Something you built and later killed — and how you knew it was time.

How we read it: whatever you send is reviewed by two of our engineers with your name removed. They answer one question — would you want to learn from whoever built this?

https://hiring-agent-sand.vercel.app/v2/apply/group-cto

We hire on capability — regardless of nationality, gender, age, disability, parental or caring responsibilities, or background. Tell us if you need any adjustment to the process.