Evaluation infrastructure
Red-team frameworks, evidence taxonomies, and reproducibility tooling for adversarial testing engagements.
Talent
CTO
Syntony · Remote · Durham, NC · Team growth planned across SF · DC · London · Brussels · SingaporeLead engineering at Syntony. Own evaluation tooling, causal mapping for AI risk, and governance instrumentation. Set technical direction, build the team, ship into real engagements.
About Syntony
Syntony is an AI risk firm. We conduct adversarial evaluations of frontier and production AI systems, build the governance architecture to act on findings, and ship software that makes both repeatable. We work with frontier labs, public sector clients, and enterprise deployments where the stakes are real.
Our name comes from early radio. Syntony is the condition of being tuned to the same frequency. A signal is useless if the transmitter and receiver are out of phase. The same problem exists across AI governance: evaluation teams find something, legal has a different timeline, ops has a different process, and leadership has not been briefed. We close that gap.
About the role
We are hiring our CTO to lead the technical side of Syntony. You will own engineering across our product suite: evaluation tooling, causal mapping for AI risk, and governance instrumentation. You will set the technical direction and build the team underneath you.
You will partner closely with the founder on strategy, technical hiring, and product roadmap.
Technical leadership, not management overhead
You set engineering direction and ship alongside the team. We do not hire CTOs to attend meetings.
Multi-disciplinary by design
Engineering decisions are pressure-tested by red teamers, policy analysts, and forecasting specialists. The work compounds across disciplines.
Evaluation and governance, not generic ML
The work sits between adversarial testing, system dynamics, and governance artifact generation. Domain depth matters.
Decision-relevant outputs
The systems you build ship into real engagements. Findings reach a reviewer, regulator, or operator and get acted on.
Scope
What you will own
GovTune AI
The product that ingests a red-team trace and drafts a governance finding a review board can act on.
CLD Suite
Interactive causal loop diagrams for AI risk. Public preview is live; next version is client-customized.
Risk index pipeline
Ingestion, scoring, and surfacing of sector-level AI risk signal across thousands of incidents.
Engineering hiring and standards
You build the team underneath you. You set the bar.
Strong candidates will have
- 8+ years of experience shipping production systems in industry, research, or both.
- Demonstrated technical leadership: led engineering teams, set direction, made hiring decisions you stand behind.
- Strong systems thinking and comfort across the stack: ML and evaluation workflows, backend, data engineering, structured extraction.
- Clear written and verbal communication; ability to brief technical and non-technical reviewers.
- Comfort with ambiguity and ill-defined problems.
- A track record of shipping: code we can look at, products that exist, papers with engineering substance.
Bonus
- Background in AI safety, ML security, adversarial robustness, or governance tooling.
- Experience with evaluation frameworks (Inspect, OpenAI Evals, custom harnesses).
- Familiarity with agentic systems, tool-use sandboxing, or autonomy evaluation.
- Prior work with frontier labs or in regulated industries (defense, finance, healthcare).
- Independent research, open-source contribution, or technical communication.
How we evaluate
We weight demonstrated work heavily. Lead with your strongest work in your application. Our process is built around real work, not algorithmic puzzles.
- Application review and short async conversation.
- Paid work sample (4 to 6 hours) closely related to the role.
- Two technical conversations.
- Reference conversations.
- Offer.
Compensation & benefits
The offer
Cash
We pay competitively for senior engineering leadership at our stage. Numbers are a real conversation, not a posted band. We calibrate to scope, the path Syntony is on, and what you need to make this work.
Equity
Founding-team equity. Real ownership, not symbolic. The grant reflects that you are joining before the round, not after it.
Benefits
Healthcare, retirement, generous time off, parental leave. We use the same infrastructure most serious early-stage companies use and we tailor the package to your situation at offer.
Equipment
Your choice of hardware. Whatever lets you do your best work, including coworking if you want it.
Research and publication
You publish under your own name. Editorial support, conference travel, and co-authorship on relevant work are defaults, not exceptions.
Sabbatical
We want this to be a career, not a sprint. Sabbatical eligibility scales with tenure.
Location
Remote. Syntony is based in Durham, North Carolina, with team growth planned across San Francisco, Washington DC, London, Brussels, and Singapore. These are the cities the work is heading toward. Working near a current or planned hub is helpful for periodic in-person collaboration, but it is not required. Geography is not a filter for the right person.
Apply
Apply for the CTO role
Email hello@syntonyresearch.org with the subject line "CTO | [Your Name]", or use the form below. Include a brief note, links to your work, and one thing you would change about how AI evaluation is currently practiced.
Applications reviewed on a rolling basis.