Founding CTO / AI Engineer

Right now, who gets funded depends on who you happen to know. If you're in Silicon Valley with the right warm intros, you raise. If you're a brilliant founder in Lagos, Karachi, Bogotá or anywhere outside the default networks, you spend months in cold email purgatory, regardless of how good your company or non-profit is.

IRIS is rebuilding that. She's a personal AI fundraising agent for the most exceptional founders. She gets to know each founder, their stage and what they're raising, then makes the warm introductions that move their round forward.

IRIS works both sides of that connection. For investors, she's signal: a stream of qualified, pre-vetted founders matched to their real thesis, with the warm path already mapped, and far less noise than their inbox. The founders get access; the investors get the right founders in front of them. Underneath, IRIS is a relationship intelligence layer, part network operating system, part CRM, part autonomous agent, that learns from every interaction and gets sharper the more the network uses her.

She lives where founders and investors already work, across email, WhatsApp, phone and web. We're starting with women founders in Europe, and building toward every founder, in every market, who has been raising on the wrong side of the network.

We're looking for a Founding CTO to lead the technical build of IRIS, shape product and architecture from day one, and grow the engineering team as the company scales.

Tasks

• Translate real-world network behaviour into structured data and intelligent, AI-driven workflows
• Own the product architecture from MVP to scale across email, WhatsApp, phone and web, on a secure, serverless cloud foundation
• Design AI systems with a strong focus on safety, fairness, privacy and transparency, ensuring recommendations and matching logic are responsible, explainable and free from harmful biasImplement best practices for AI governance, model evaluation and responsible data usage as the platform scales
• Understand user requirements and work with the CEO to build the technical strategy and roadmap
• Be hands on and build and lead the engineering team as the company grows

Requirements

• Strong AI engineering background, with hands-on experience building and scaling AI or data-driven products in production
• Experience building trustworthy AI products, including model evaluation, bias mitigation, privacy-preserving systems and safe deployment practices
• Deep technical familiarity with modern cloud and serverless infrastructureAbility to move fast from zero to one with limited resources
• Product-minded engineer who understands user behaviour and real-world workflows (you prioritise frictionless data capture over clunky UI layers)
• Comfortable with ambiguity and shaping technical direction
• Experience in the venture ecosystem is a strong advantage
• Willing to work close to European hours

Benefits

• Build a product that meaningfully changes who gets funded
• Shape a new category of AI product, one that lives where people already work and acts on their behalf, not behind another chat window
• Founding equity, high ownership, real impact
• Work directly with a founder who has built and raised VC capital before (Cellcraft, Series A in progress)
• Shape the technical and ethical foundations of the product from day one

The way capital gets allocated today is inefficient and unfair. The best founders don't always get funded; the best-connected ones do. That's a routing failure, and it has real consequences for which companies get built and which problems get solved.

IRIS is an attempt to fix it at the infrastructure level. We're opening access to networks that were closed, routing capital toward fit and merit rather than proximity, and moving founders forward with the coaching and preparation they need to actually succeed once they get the meeting. Done right, this changes who gets funded, and that changes what gets built.

If you want to spend your time on a problem that matters, with the ownership of a founding role and the leverage to affect it at scale, build IRIS with us.