Founding CTO - Hands On Fullstack
Summary
The Founding CTO will lead the technical architecture and hands-on development of an AI-powered recruitment platform, transitioning existing solutions into a scalable product. This role requires deep full-stack expertise in React, Python, and SQL, alongside experience in building and deploying LLM-based agents and managing AWS cloud infrastructure.
Salary: $170,000 – $230,000 per year
About the role
We are an Australian AI company building AI-powered workforces for recruitment companies and talent acquisition teams. We take the repetitive, high volume work that fills a recruiter's day, sourcing, screening, coordination, compliance, timesheets, invoicing, and turn it into digital workers that do it properly, with a human in the loop where it matters.
This isn't a startup on Day 0. We already have paying customers and many more in the pipeline, code exists, solutions are deployed, and your job is to take us to the next stage.
The Founding CTO owns the platform: how it gets built, how it runs, how it scales and how safe it is. For the first year this is predominantly a building role, with no engineering team to inherit and no one to delegate to. You are accountable for taking us from a working core and point solutions to a platform we can sell modules from, migrating existing customers onto it, and then building and leading the engineering team that carries it forward.
That first year is hands-on building, most of it in code. Not just new front end features, but making the product real: creating agents that run, building the ingestion and the evaluation that stand behind them, and putting the operational layer underneath so we can ship and support what we sell.
As an AI platform, we have an AI first mindset, using AI tooling to multiply the output of our team across all disciplines. You need agentic coding tools to be core to how you work, not something you have tried. We expect one engineer here to produce at the scale of a team, and we expect the review discipline that makes that safe: nothing reaches production that a human on the team cannot explain and defend.
Key responsibilities
Take ownership of the platform architecture, review what has been built, and set the direction from there, making and documenting foundational decisions on transformation approach, agent runtime design, framework and model choices, front end stack, and API and service boundaries.
Build and ship the platform using React and JavaScript on the front end, Python and FastAPI on the back, and real SQL across both: PostgreSQL for the control plane, Snowflake for analytics. Moving it to TypeScript and putting linting, formatting and a real test suite around it is an early call we expect you to make.
Build the agent runtime and digital workers that operate within the recruitment workflow, with human-in-the-loop control where required, owning the interaction design of agentic features, including how an autonomous system is made legible to a user.
Run the full stack end to end: the Snowflake data platform and its medallion layers, building the ingestion from customer source systems, the shared platform tools and integration adapters, and tenant isolation across the data platform, the tool layer and the application layer.
Build the operational layer that does not yet exist, and grow the AWS environment around it: infrastructure as code, a deployment pipeline, logging, monitoring and error tracking, and an evaluation harness for agent quality, from Bedrock and SQS today through to the wider environment you build.
Set WIITY's AI risk posture and deliver the technical implementation behind it: bias and adverse impact testing, human oversight, disclosure and AI content marking, model and prompt change control, and Australian data residency with Bedrock instances isolated to Australian regions and no customer data leaving the country or used to train models.
Carry production support and on-call until the team is large enough to share the rotation, including incident response and root cause analysis.
Define the engineering team required, then recruit it, mentor and coach engineers, and set and hold the engineering standard.
About you
Technical
You still write code every week and you want to keep doing it. This is a building role first and a leadership role second, and it stays that way for at least twelve months.
Genuinely full stack, with real depth in React. The platform is JavaScript today and moving it to TypeScript is one of the early calls we expect you to make. Enough design sense to build something usable without a designer, because there isn't one.
Strong Python, and real SQL rather than ORM-mediated familiarity. Our control plane is raw SQL with row-level security and function-level boundaries, and you need to be able to extend it and defend it to an auditor.
Production experience building with LLMs. Tool and function calling, orchestration you wrote rather than a framework you configured, evaluation, and the unglamorous work of making non-deterministic systems behave.
You have taken something from working to operable before. Infrastructure as code, deployment, monitoring, evaluation. This is the biggest single gap in our platform and the thing most likely to decide whether year one succeeds.
Enough cloud and data depth to own AWS and Snowflake decisions and hire well against them. You do not need to have been a data engineer.
How you work
Used to owning something from start to finish. You ask enough questions to get clarity, then move fast.
Opinionated about architecture, and quick to commit once a decision is made.
Comfortable with ambiguity, a roadmap that moves, and an architecture you are expected to change.
Decisions here get made in the moment, not two weeks later in a steering pack. That should sound like a relief rather than a risk.
Sceptical of your own agents, and inclined to prove they work rather than assume it.
As one of the faces of this business, comfortable in front of customers.