Chief Technology Officer

Please do not reach out to the CEO or other members of our team directly through any means; all candidates must apply through this platform.

The Company

colliga is building deterministic governance for probabilistic AI systems (large language models to start). It checks what a probabilistic model produces against the rules an enterprise has set, determines admissibility, and keeps a versioned, replayable record of every decision. It works mid-stream, and only returns responses that are fully compliant, thus replacing traditional guardrails.

The problem

Businesses deploying AI are discovering that a model usually behaves as trained with current governance techniques, but not always. "Usually" is not good enough for high-stakes use-cases, and therefore not something a regulator, auditor or buyer's legal or security teams will sign off on. As a result, AI is failing to reach its full potential for critical tasks. A governed, logged, deterministic gate can turn "usually" into "always, provably, and with evidence" for many of these systems.

We hold a family of 14 filed patents, have a working prototype and a proof of concept, and are ready to build the first production product.

The role

The Chief Technology Officer is the technical owner of that thesis: what is built, what works, what the evidence supports, and what the company can honestly promise customers and investors. You will be the single technical voice who sets direction, arbitrates between competing designs, and leads the engineers who build it.

You report to the founder and CEO. You lead the engineering team and own the code and infrastructure, with authority over technical direction, hiring, architecture, security posture and engineering process. You work alongside the founder on intellectual property with outside counsel and technical reviewers, including investor due diligence.

What will you do

1. Set the technical direction and own the architecture, and settle technical questions between engineers and between designs.

2. Take the company's prototype to a production release of the governed gate, with the structured decision log as a first-class product feature.

3. Own the evidence standard: what counts as proof for a technical claim, how tests are kept honest, and how results, including negative ones, are reported to the board and to buyers.

4. Put in place the engineering controls a buyer's due diligence looks for (change approval, logging, access control, vulnerability handling, incident response) and lead the company toward a security attestation such as SOC 2.

5. Build and lead the team: hiring plans, interview and leveling practice, and a clear working agreement with the founder on what is decided where.

6. Represent the technology to investors, buyers, regulators and counsel, and be the person who says no when a claim is not supported.

What we are looking for

Must haves

1. Ten or more years building production software systems, with at least four years leading engineers, and experience as a head of engineering, VP or CTO at a company that sold software to businesses.

2. Strong systems and backend engineering judgment: you can read an unfamiliar codebase and judge a design that someone else built.

3. Direct experience with security and compliance for software sold to businesses, such as taking a company through SOC 2 or an equivalent attestation.

4. Demonstrated experience with applied language models in production: how they fail, how they are evaluated, and how guardrails and output checks work.

5. Comfort with cloud infrastructure on a major provider and the operational discipline around it (deployment, secrets, logging, recovery).

6. The ability to explain technical trade-offs in plain words to non-technical internal and external stakeholders without overclaiming.

7. A habit of measuring: you distrust a result until you have seen how it was tested.

Advantageous differentiators

1. Background in deterministic or verifiable systems: formal methods, rule engines, compilers, policy engines or high-assurance software.

2. Experience with audit trails, event sourcing, cryptographic receipts or signed logs.

3. Natural language processing background (parsing, information extraction, controlled languages).

4. Experience in regulated sectors: financial services, health, insurance or the public sector.

5. Experience hiring for and managing a small, senior engineering team.

A career-changing opportunity

This is an early, hands-on leadership role in a small company with a clear technical thesis, a filed patent family, and a founder who values what a technical partner brings to the table. You will help shape the product, the team, and the engineering culture from the start as well as own the code.

Terms

Location: Remote. Compensation commensurate with experience. Start date: ASAP.

How to apply

Submit your resume and a brief note highlighting relevant experience.

Equal opportunity

colliga is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applicants of every background and do not discriminate on the basis of race, ethnic origin, gender, religion or belief, disability, age, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Job Types: Contract, Full-time

Work Location: Remote