Technical Co-Founder / CTO (Chief Technology Officer)

Technical Co-Founder / CTO

Location Field

San Francisco, USA

Employment Type

Full-time · Co-founder

Company Description

MorphMana is an early-stage startup building foundational infrastructure for AI-native teams.  Individual productivity has raced ahead of team coordination, and the layer that closes that gap doesn't exist yet. We're building it. Stealth mode.

Role Description

This is a full-time, on-site role based in San Francisco, CA, for a Chief Technology Officer. The Chief Technology Officer will be responsible for overseeing the company’s technical vision, developing and implementing IT strategies, and leading the architecture and delivery of software and product development initiatives. Responsibilities will also include managing technology teams, ensuring the scalability and security of systems, and collaborating with executive leadership to align technological initiatives with business goals. The CTO will play a critical role in shaping the company’s technological future and driving innovation in its offerings.

The Role

As Technical Co-Founder / CTO, you own the technical architecture and engineering organization end-to-end. You will:

• Architect the Context Graph. Design the graph schema, retrieval layer, real-time propagation logic, and permissioned query model.
• Lead the multi-agent system. Design the coordination protocol that keeps them coherent as they operate concurrently.
• Own the tech stack decisions. Graph database (Neo4j vs. alternatives), vector store, real-time layer (CRDTs vs. OT), LLM selection per task, agent orchestration framework, MCP ingestion architecture.
• Build and lead the engineering team. Hire and mentor engineers across full-stack, AI/ML, and infrastructure. Establish engineering culture, code review practices, and shipping cadence.
• Represent engineering in strategy. You are a peer to the founder on product, go-to-market, and fundraising decisions. You are a co-founder with equity, equity voice, and equity conviction.

What You Bring

Required:

• Software engineering experience with technical leadership roles.
• Track record of shipping and scaling collaborative systems used by real teams. You've been a senior on something hard. Ideally, you've been a principal, staff, or founding engineer at a company where the technical complexity was real.
• Deep AI fluency - retrieval systems, agent architecture, model selection trade-offs, and a working understanding of what LLMs are actually good at vs. where they fail silently.
• Full-stack range. You don't need to be the best at every layer, but you've designed and shipped frontend, backend, data, and infrastructure. You earn the right to lead by having been everywhere.
• A history of hiring people who became your peers.

Preferred:

• Prior founding or very early-stage (pre-Series A) experience.
• Deep background in at least one of: real-time collaborative systems, distributed data systems, multi-agent architectures, or retrieval-heavy AI systems.
• An existing network of engineering talent you could pull in during the first 6 months.
• A perspective on where AI-native product development is going that you've already been thinking about independently.

Non-negotiable:

• Product instinct and customer empathy. You can't be allergic to the user side of the problem. The hardest architecture decisions on this product are shaped by product constraints, not the other way around.
• Builder mindset. You ship. You iterate. You decide and move. You know the difference between "good enough to learn from" and "good enough to scale."
• Commitment horizon. This is a 5–7 year journey. If you're pattern-matching for a 2-year CTO stint, we're not a fit.

What You Get

• Co-founder title and equity. Meaningful range — specifics negotiated based on the stage at which you join and what you bring. Standard vesting with co-founder protections.
• O-1 Visa Sponsorship
• Real autonomy. You own the engineering organization. No committee. No politics. No "consensus first."
• A peer relationship, not a reporting one. You have full voice on strategy, fundraising, and hiring.
• A real problem to build, not a vision to discover. The customer's work is done. The specification exists. The pilots are lined up. You focus on architecture and team, not on figuring out what to build.
• Category ownership. If we get this right, we define a category for the next decade.

Compensation Structure

• Early stage.
• Market-rate salary at Seed post-funding. Targeting the typical technical co-founder range once the round closes (the figure depends on round size and closes, happy to discuss specifics on call).
• Equity: Co-founder-level stake, standard 4-year vesting, acceleration on change of control.