HANDS-ON CTO / FOUNDING ENGINEERING LEAD

HANDS-ON CTO / FOUNDING ENGINEERING LEAD

Stealth AI Company | Accounting Automation

Location: New York City preferred; hybrid. Remote considered for the right candidate.

Employment: Full-time

Reports to: CEO

ABOUT THE COMPANY

We’re an early-stage AI company building software that automates complex, document-heavy accounting workflows, starting with financial statement preparation and audit support.

Our approach combines deterministic rules with AI: financial calculations must be accurate, traceable to source documents, and reviewable by accounting professionals. AI supports extraction, interpretation, and workflow automation, while people review exceptions and approve final outputs.

THE OPPORTUNITY

We’re looking for a hands-on technical leader who enjoys building software and wants meaningful ownership of a product, architecture, and engineering team.

You will take over the existing codebase and technical roadmap from the CEO, who built the first version. You’ll write code most days, develop and deploy AI agents, review the team’s work, and make practical architectural decisions.

The current team includes one full-time and one part-time engineer, with scope for one additional hire.

We welcome both an experienced hands-on CTO and a strong senior, staff, or lead engineer ready to grow into the CTO role. The title and scope will reflect demonstrated experience and readiness.

WHAT YOU’LL BUILD AND OWN

• Production AI agents: Develop agents that use tools, retrieve information, coordinate multi-step workflows, and escalate uncertain results for human review.

• Agent reliability: Build evaluation datasets, regression tests, tracing, guardrails, failure recovery, and cost controls.

• Financial rules engine: Maintain correctness, test coverage, performance, and the safe introduction of new accounting rules.

• Document pipelines: Extract and validate data from Excel files, PDFs, scanned documents, trial balances, bank statements, filings, and contracts.

• Client applications and integrations: Build the portal and connections to systems such as Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Caseware, NetSuite, QuickBooks, Sage, and Xero.

• Infrastructure and security: Own deployment, access controls, logging, encryption, tenant isolation, backups, incident response, and the path to SOC 2 Type II.

• Engineering delivery: Lead a small team, establish standards, review code, hire thoughtfully, and ship against customer commitments.

You’ll work directly with founders and pilot customers to understand real workflows and turn their needs into reliable software.

WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR

• Personal, hands-on experience building and deploying AI agents, with clear examples of code and systems you owned.

• Strong Python or equivalent backend engineering skills.

• Experience with agent orchestration, tool/function calling, state management, retrieval, and API integrations.

• Practical experience evaluating agent behavior and debugging failures in production—not simply building demonstrations.

• Familiarity with frameworks such as LangGraph, OpenAI Agents SDK, or comparable tools or custom implementations.

• Production LLM experience covering prompt and retrieval design, structured outputs, guardrails, latency, and cost management.

• Experience building deterministic systems where correctness matters.

• Document extraction and validation experience, including PDF, OCR, and structured/unstructured inputs.

• Experience with accounting or financial data, such as ledgers, trial balances, financial statements, reconciliation, fund accounting, or regulatory reporting.

• Modern cloud infrastructure, security, privacy, and data-controls experience.

• Evidence of technical ownership and the ability to mentor or lead engineers while remaining an active developer.

PARTICULARLY VALUABLE

• Accounting software integrations or experience with accounting-firm workflows.

• Human-in-the-loop agent workflows, MCP integrations, and auditable tool execution.

• Early-stage startup or zero-to-one product development.

• Experience preparing a company for SOC 2.

• Close collaboration with accountants, auditors, or tax professionals.

COMPENSATION

• Base salary: $150,000–$170,000, depending on experience.

• Equity: 4%–7% of fully diluted shares, depending on experience, through stock options vesting over four years with a one-year cliff.

• Health benefits and paid time off.

INTERESTED?

We’d especially like to understand what you coded, how the system operates in production, and how you evaluated its reliability.

The company’s identity and further product details will be shared during the recruiting process.