SUN
Founding CTO/Head of Engineering at AI Startup (backed by a16z Speedrun, pre-see
SUN, Palo Alto, California, United States, 94306
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.
#J-18808-Ljbffr
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.
#J-18808-Ljbffr