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

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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