Founding Chief Technology Officer

Founding CTOPLANET.TECH — Austin, TX · On-site + in the field · Founding equityAbout PLANET.TECHPLANET.TECH finds problems where people aren't looking and builds technology to solve them, so that future generations inherit a cleaner, better planet.Today the problem is cattle. Preventable livestock death costs American producers billions a year, and every existing tool catches illness only after it's visible, which is often too late. We built the first continuous, non-invasive biometric monitoring platform for cattle: a wearable that reads an animal's physiology around the clock and flags acute distress hours before a person could see it.The hardware works. It's been on animals in Texas since spring. Our first 100-unit build is on the bench right now, and it goes onto ranches in September. We need the technical leader who takes it from there to ten thousand — and then decides, with us, what we solve next.The question this posting exists to askAre you hungry enough to learn whatever you need to learn to make an ambitious vision physically true — and then build the team that does it again?If that sentence made you feel found, keep reading. If it made you feel confused, this isn't your role, and that's okay.The roleThis is a builder's CTO seat, not a slideware one. You'll be in the lab, at the ranch, and across the table from investors — often in the same week.In your first six months you will:Own the path from working prototype to manufacturable product: design-for-manufacture, EVT/DVT/PVT, and a unit a contract manufacturer can build without you in the roomOwn signal quality on a living, moving animal: sensor placement, noise rejection, and validation against veterinary gold standardsDrive cost-down from prototype economics to commercial unit economicsLead and grow the technical team — embedded hardware, backend data, and biomedical data science are already in the building; you hire the restStand as the technical authority of the company with investors, ranchers, veterinarians, and government partnersSet the architecture decisions — connectivity platform, firmware strategy, data pipeline — that we'll live with at 10,000 unitsWho you areYou've shipped hardware at manufacturing scale: you've taken a product through EVT/DVT/PVT and into volume production, and you own outcomes, not tasksWearables, cellular connectivity, or camera/photonics module experience is a strong signal — that's the muscle memory this stage requiresYou've crossed at least one domain boundary in your career and came out shipping. If a recruiter would call your resume "scattered," we'll probably call it coherentYou default to first principles when the field is new and to speed when the path is clearYou build teams, not just things: you've hired, led, and multiplied engineersYou hear "planetary-scale problems" and start asking what's actually hard about themAustin, or willing to be. This company is built in person and in the fieldWhat you getFounding equity — co-founder-level ownership in a company built to last decadesA working product, live deployments, and paying customers in motionA CEO whose job is enrollment, capital, and foresight — looking for the partner who makes the vision physically trueA real, measurable problem to solve now, in service of problems that matter for a centuryHow to applySend a resume, or a link to something you built, to careers@planet.tech with "CTO" in the subject line. Tell us about a time you walked into a field you knew nothing about and shipped anyway. We'll get back to you within 48 hours.PLANET.TECH · Physical AI · Austin, TX