Toptal enables businesses to hire the world’s top talent. Since 2010, 35,000+ clients have trusted Toptal for talent, teams, and end-to-end solutions. Backed by a16z.
About the role
The following information is intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed. It is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities, or required skills. One precondition runs through all of it: you conceive the strategy. You will form your own view of where engineering and AI should go, build the case, and bring the CEO a strategy to react to, not a request for direction.
What they're looking for
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field is required, and an advanced degree is strongly preferred
- 15+ years of progressive engineering leadership, including significant time as a CTO or VP of Engineering, or as a direct report to one at meaningful scale
- Agentic systems deployed at scale against real business processes, with measured outcomes on cost, cycle time, quality, or revenue, and a record of retiring what did not work
- Rigor about evaluation. You can explain precisely how you knew a model, prompt, or agent change was an improvement, and you can show the evidence
- Command of the economics underneath it: model routing, hosted versus self-hosted, inference capacity, latency and cost budgets, and staying portable across providers
- Further ahead on AI than the executives around you, able to teach it, and proven at moving an organization to adopt something it was not asking for
More about this role
Toptal is a global network of top talent in business, design, and technology that enables companies to scale their teams, on-demand. With $200+ million in annual revenue and team members based around the globe , Toptal is the world’s largest fully remote workforce .
We take the best elements of virtual teams and combine them with a support structure that encourages innovation, social interaction, and fun. We see no borders, move at a fast pace, and are never afraid to break the mold.
As Chief Technology Officer, you will drive execution for the product and engineering teams and put AI at the core of everything the company builds. You will own Toptal’s full technical architecture and you will build it AI-first—utilizing best practices for agentic engineering. AI is not a workstream inside the engineer team—its core to it.
You will create and own the AI architecture and best practices the rest of the company utilizes. You will also own the initiatives that put agents into production. You should know how to build and fine-tune foundation models from the ground up, how to engineer best-in-class harnesses, and how to create best practices for agentic engineering that engineering teams...
Browse similar: Startup jobs · Remote jobs