Axial Search is working with a seed-stage AI company as it makes a senior technical leadership hire. The business has early commercial traction and is moving from initial product validation into broader deployment, team buildout and an active seed raise.

This is a founding-team role for an AI-focused technical leader who can operate at executive level in a fast-moving early-stage environment. The role will report to the Founder and sit as a core member of the leadership team. Title is still being finalized, but the position is likely to sit at CTO or VP-level depending on the candidate’s background, strengths and fit with the existing team.

The company already has strong technical leadership around architecture, infrastructure, tenancy and systems design. This hire is intended to complement that foundation rather than duplicate it. The gap is deeper AI expertise, particularly someone who lives closer to the model layer than the platform layer and can lead how AI capabilities are built, evaluated and scaled.

A core part of the company’s thesis is organizational intelligence: building a persistent knowledge layer that compounds over time across documents, relationships, financial cycles, institutional memory and operational context. The right candidate will be excited by the challenge of turning that accumulated knowledge into reliable, useful AI capability inside real businesses.

This is not a pure management role. The successful candidate will write code, lead engineers and make core AI implementation decisions. They will also play an important role in the company’s active seed raise, owning the technical narrative with investors and helping articulate why the AI strategy, product direction and engineering approach are credible and defensible.

Key responsibilities:

Lead the company’s AI technical strategy across product development, implementation and deployment.
Own the technical narrative in investor conversations, particularly around AI strategy, defensibility and execution.
Own hands-on development of AI capabilities across early product builds, pilots and production systems.
Make practical decisions on model selection, LLM tooling, fine-tuning, orchestration and related AI engineering approaches.
Build and improve AI systems that create persistent organizational intelligence over time.
Develop approaches for evaluating AI system performance, reliability and output quality.
Establish strong practices around guardrails, testing, monitoring and continuous improvement.
Recruit, lead and develop a small team of engineers as the company scales.
Drive engineering velocity in a lean seed-stage environment where priorities shift quickly.

Candidate requirements:

Deep technical expertise in AI, machine learning, neural networks and modern generative AI systems.
Hands-on experience building with large language models in commercial or production environments.
Experience with fine-tuning, LLM tooling, agentic systems, orchestration or related applied AI techniques.
Strong coding ability, with willingness to remain deeply involved in technical execution.
Startup experience strongly preferred, especially zero-to-one or early product buildout experience.
Experience in a high-growth software company also highly relevant.
Prior fundraising exposure strongly preferred, with the ability to credibly own the technical narrative in front of VCs.
Founder-level ownership mentality, with appetite for meaningful equity and seed-stage risk.

Location is flexible. Bay Area proximity is helpful, but AI depth, technical strength, investor credibility, ownership mindset and fit with the founding team are the priorities.

Founding CTO - AI Engineering