Founding CTO/Head of Engineering at AI Startup (backed by a16z Speedrun, pre-see

Founding CTO/Head of Engineering at AI Startup (backed by a16z Speedrun, pre‑seed)

SUN is an AI audio‑learning app. A GenAI alternative to Audible and podcasts. We turn any topic, book, or idea into a high‑quality audio course, with real‑time Q&A while listening.

We just got into the a16z Speedrun SR006 program (0.5% acceptance rate), kicking off this January in San Francisco.

We’re now looking for a Founding CTO, a Staff/Principal‑level AI Engineer. Someone who is positive, slightly delusional (in the best founder way), a high‑performer with high integrity, and genuinely smart.

If that’s you, you’ll feel at home here.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and ship code daily across AI, web, mobile, and infra
• Lead and mentor team engineers
• Design and optimize our AI system: quality, speed, cost, evals, context, TTS, conversational agents
• Own the entire technical roadmap from 0→1 and beyond
• Recruit, hire, and build the early engineering team
• Establish engineering culture, velocity, and standards from day one
• Help define the DNA of the company

Qualifications

• 5+ years architecting, shipping & scaling AI products
• Deep experience with LLMs, evals, context/retrieval systems, TTS, agents, and model integration
• Comfortable across the stack: Flutter, Node, Supabase, AWS, DevOps, pipelines, instrumentation
• Experience recruiting and building small, elite engineering teams
• Ideally Bay Area‑based (we’ll be in SF during a16z Speedrun program)
• Bias toward action, craftsmanship, and building fast without drama
• Positive attitude, high personal integrity, and the founder‑level ambition to build something huge

What we offer

• Founding equity, ownership, and a much lower salary than at big tech lol
• A once‑in‑a‑lifetime opportunity to help build the next unicorn company from day zero
• Direct access to a16z’s network and Speedrun support at the earliest stage

If you’re a Silicon Valley experienced AI Engineer who codes daily, ships, and dreams big, let’s talk.

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