Chief Technology Officer

IMPORTANT: This role requires you to live in the Seattle metropolitan area. The work is fully remote, but we are hiring locally in this metro. Applications from outside Seattle will not be considered, and automated or bulk applications will be rejected.

Leorna is building the big-data platform that gives AI agents persistent long-term memory — a "forever memory" layer so agents can store, retrieve, and reason over everything they've learned instead of starting from scratch every session.

We're very early, pre-funding, and moving fast. The person who takes this role isn't inheriting a technology organization. They're building one.

THE ROLE

We're looking for a Chief Technology Officer who is, first and foremost, a working architect and engineer. This is not a role where you direct a team and review their designs. For the foreseeable future you are the team: you'll own the technology strategy and then personally build the thing. You'll make the architecture calls, write the production code, stand up the infrastructure, and set the standards the rest of engineering will inherit.

You'll also make Leorna agent-native from day one. We expect our CTO to run an engineering org where AI and automation do a disproportionate share of the work — not as a novelty, but as the operating model that lets a tiny team ship like a large one.

You'll report to and work in close partnership with the CEO.

WHAT YOU'LL OWN

Technology strategy and architecture

• Define the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for the memory platform

• Design and implement the memory storage and retrieval layer: vector search, embeddings, context management, and the data pipelines that feed them

• Choose the models, infrastructure, and data stores the product runs on, and document the tradeoffs

• Stand up evaluation, benchmarking, and reliability practices so agent memory stays accurate and fast under load

Hands-on engineering

• Write and review production code daily. This stays a coding role.

• Take features from prototype to hardened production, often in the same week

• Manage multiple repositories: structure, branching strategy, cross-repo dependencies, and real Git maintenance (rebases, history cleanup, submodules or monorepo tooling, tagging and release management, hooks, access control)

• Own infrastructure, deployment pipelines, observability, and security administration

AI-native engineering operations

• Set up, configure, and operate OpenClaw, Hermes, Claude Code, and OpenAI Codex as first-class parts of how we build

• Build and maintain MCP servers, skills, agent configs, and local agent gateways the team uses daily

• Design and build automation for CI/CD, testing, deploys, data pipelines, code review, and internal ops

• Identify recurring manual work across engineering and the business and replace it with reliable agentic or scripted workflows

• Keep the automation observable and maintainable, not a pile of brittle scripts

Company building

• Partner with the CEO on strategic planning, budgeting for technology and tooling, and execution against company objectives

• Support fundraising: technical due diligence, investor materials, and conversations about our technology

• Lead technical hiring, set engineering culture, and mentor as the team grows

• Contribute to product strategy, sales engineering, and other revenue-generating work as needed

Because we're early, you'll also do work outside any traditional CTO scope: vendor and tool selection, IT and security administration, customer and partner technical relationships, and whatever gap opens up that week.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Must-haves

• You live in the Seattle metropolitan area

• You are a builder first. Deep experience architecting and personally shipping production systems

• Strong AI/ML engineering background: LLMs, embeddings, vector search, retrieval, context management, and agentic systems

• Real working knowledge of OpenClaw, Hermes, Claude Code, and OpenAI Codex

• Serious automation and workflow engineering: CI/CD, orchestration, scripting, infrastructure as code

• Advanced Git and multi-repo experience, including the maintenance work most engineers avoid

• Track record of technical leadership. You've set direction others followed, formally or not

• Comfort with high ambiguity, high ownership, and no playbook

• You currently hold and actively use a premium AI subscription (Claude Max, ChatGPT Pro, or equivalent at the $200/month tier)

Nice to have

• Prior CTO, VP Engineering, or founding engineer role at an early-stage startup

• Experience supporting a fundraise as the technical voice in the room

• Distributed systems, large-scale data infrastructure, or database internals

• Open-source contributions to agent tooling, MCP servers, or developer infrastructure

TERMS: PLEASE READ BEFORE APPLYING

• This is a founding-team, equity-only role right now. There is no cash compensation until we close funding. After funding, this converts to salary plus continued equity. Equity for this role reflects its seniority and scope.

• Fully remote, but you must live in the Seattle metropolitan area.

• Full-time. High dedication, fast pace. We're pre-funding and building against a real window.

• You must hold an active Claude or OpenAI Codex subscription and use AI tooling as a core part of how you work.

If equity-only doesn't work for your situation right now, we completely understand, and we'd still like to talk when we've raised.

HOW TO APPLY

Apply here, or grab a time directly on my calendar: https://cal.com/mnylif/interview

In your application, tell me about a system you architected and built yourself, and how you're using AI and automation in your own engineering workflow today. Generic or automated applications will be rejected.

— Michael, Founder & CEO