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. Equity-heavy founding role for a senior builder who wants real ownership before the round.
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 looking for a CTO to lead the technical side of Syntony as a true founding technical partner. 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.
Syntony is founder-led, pre-seed, and cash-constrained until financing. This role is therefore structured around meaningful founding-team equity rather than a standard cash salary and benefits package at the outset.
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.
Resonance
Interactive system and attack-path mapping that carries red-team risk into evidence requirements, control claims, owners, decisions, and re-testing.
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.
- Scoped technical discussion or work sample closely related to the role.
- Two technical conversations.
- Reference conversations.
- Offer.
Founding equity
The offer structure
Equity-heavy by design
This is a founding technical leadership role structured around meaningful equity. The grant is intended to reflect that you are joining before the round, helping make the company fundable, and shaping the technical foundation from the beginning.
Cash-constrained until financing
Syntony is currently pre-seed and founder-led. Near-term cash compensation is limited. The right candidate should be excited by asymmetric upside, company-building, and the chance to help unlock the next stage of financing.
Founder-level ownership
You would help set technical direction, product architecture, hiring standards, engineering culture, and investor-facing technical strategy. This is not a staff-plus title with a CTO label.
Path after the round
As financing allows, the role can convert into a more conventional full-time executive package, including salary and benefits. The initial structure is designed for the pre-seed reality, not the long-term ceiling.
Research and publication
You publish under your own name where appropriate. Technical work can become products, evaluation infrastructure, papers, public demos, and artifacts that establish Syntony's credibility in the market.
Open conversation
The exact structure depends on fit, scope, availability, and risk tolerance. We will be direct about constraints and equally direct about the ownership opportunity.
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.ai 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.