Founding CTO / Principal AI Engineer

Orchestra is an AI trade-compliance platform, already in the market and in real use. The hard zero-to-one is done: the product works and solves a painful, expensive problem for US importers and customs brokers. We are looking for a Founding CTO to take it from a fast-built early product to an enterprise-grade platform that scales, stays secure, and runs fast under heavy real-world usage.This is a founding, equity-based role for a builder who sees where this is going and wants to own both the technology and a real stake in the company. You will not design the product from scratch. The heavy lift is done. You are the person who makes it scale.What you will ownOwn all technical direction, and take the product from its current build to an enterprise-grade platform: scalable, secure, reliable, and fast under load.Own and advance the AI layer, the language-model and agentic features that make the product intelligent, with real evaluation and guardrails.Re-architect for scale where it counts, and evolve what already works, rather than rebuilding for its own sake.Ship fast. Turn user and market insight into shipped improvements continuously.Grow into hiring and leading the engineering team as the company funds it. Hands-on builder now, engineering leader as we scale.Partner directly with the founders on product, priorities, and what we build next.What you must haveYou have personally architected and scaled a production SaaS product from an early build to enterprise-grade: real users, real load, and a real security review. This is the core requirement.Deep, hands-on experience building production AI features on large language models and agentic systems (retrieval, structured extraction, evaluation, guardrails), shipped, not prototyped.Full-stack command: you can own the backend, data model, and APIs, and ship frontend when it is needed, across modern cloud infrastructure.A track record of shipping fast on small teams, with high personal ownership and little supervision.A security and data-governance mindset fit for a compliance product: authentication, access control, audit logging, and readiness for enterprise security reviews such as SOC 2.The judgment to know what to keep, what to refactor, and what to rebuild. You improve a working product; you do not tear it up to match your own preferences.Nice to haveExperience in a regulated or data-sensitive domain: trade, fintech, regtech, govtech, or logistics.You have taken a product through SOC 2 or an equivalent security posture.Experience with document and data extraction pipelines, including OCR and structured extraction from messy source documents.Prior founding or first-engineer experience, ideally through meaningful scale or an exit.Product and design sensibility that makes software feel enterprise-grade.Who this is not forThis is not for someone who needs a finished spec, a large existing team, or a green field. The product exists and works, and your job is to make it scale. If you have only built prototypes, or you rebuild everything you inherit on principle, this is not the seat.How to applyApply here on LinkedIn. Tell us briefly about a product you took from an early build to enterprise-grade, and the hardest scaling problem you owned along the way.