SUN · 1 month ago
Founding CTO/Head of Engineering at AI Startup (backed by a16z Speedrun, pre-seed)
Palo Alto, CA
Full-time
Onsite
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
5+ years expSUN is an AI audio-learning app that serves as a GenAI alternative to Audible and podcasts. They are seeking a Founding CTO to architect and lead the technical direction of the company, build the engineering team, and optimize their AI systems.
E-learning
Responsibilities
Architect, build, and ship code daily across AI, web, mobile, and infra
Lead and mentor team engineers
Design and optimize our AI system: quality, speed, cost, evals, context, TTS, conversational agents
Own the entire technical roadmap from 0→1 and beyond
Recruit, hire, and build the early engineering team
Establish engineering culture, velocity, and standards from day one
Help define the DNA of the company
Qualification
Required
5+ years architecting, shipping & scaling AI products
Deep experience with LLMs, evals, context/retrieval systems, TTS, agents, and model integration
Comfortable across the stack: Flutter, Node, Supabase, AWS, DevOps, pipelines, instrumentation
Experience recruiting and building small, elite engineering teams
Bias toward action, craftsmanship, and building fast without drama
Positive attitude, high personal integrity, and the founder-level ambition to build something huge
Preferred
Ideally Bay Area–based (we'll be in SF during a16z Speedrun program)
Benefits
Founding equity
Ownership
A much lower salary than at big tech lol
A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help build the next unicorn company from day zero
Direct access to a16z’s network and Speedrun support at the earliest stage
Company
SUN
SUN is the first education platform where users can generate audio courses with a single prompt, ask questions, and receive context-aware answers during each lecture.
2-10 employees
H1B Sponsorship
SUN has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (4)
2024 (3)
2023 (7)
2022 (4)
2021 (4)
2020 (7)
Funding
Current Stage
Early StageCompany data provided by crunchbase