Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

About the Role

BIGmama Technology is looking for a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to lead the technical vision, execution, and team behind BIGmama and all its associated products.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will own the technology from architecture and infrastructure down to the code, while also shaping the team, the processes, and the global strategy of the company. We are looking for someone who leads by example, writes and reviews code, mentors engineers, and can defend the product in front of clients and investors.

I-Key Responsibilities

1. Technical Leadership & Strategy

• Define and own the overall technical vision and architecture across all products.

•Help inform and shape the global strategy of the startup.

•Research and stay on the lookout for relevant technologies, tools, and products.

•Challenge leadership ideas and the status quo around sales, organization, vision, and external relations, and stay up to date with company developments.

•Present informed, data-driven decision-making to resolve conflicts on implementation details.

2. Product Development & Engineering

•Maintain and develop our products by designing and implementing new features and fixing bugs.

•Articulate product roadmaps, feature specifications, and implementation plans.

•Write RFCs for the technical team.

•Build MVPs to test new ideas and tools.

•Give a hand on hard tasks and share knowledge with less experienced co-workers — no knowledge gatekeeping.

•Maintain deep, up-to-date knowledge of the technologies in use.

3. AI/ML Engineering

•Own model selection and evaluation: choose the right models for each use case and continuously benchmark cost, latency, and quality trade-offs.

•Build and maintain AI evaluation pipelines (offline and online evals, regression testing of prompts and models) to measure and protect output quality.

•Design and operate RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) systems: chunking, embeddings, retrieval quality, and context assembly.

•Implement guardrails and safety measures: input/output validation, prompt-injection defense, hallucination mitigation, and abuse/content controls.

•Own the prompt and context engineering practice across products.

4. Infrastructure, Reliability & Security

•Design and maintain a robust, scalable infrastructure to deploy and scale our solutions.

•Debug and resolve outages, and develop strategies for data integrity and backups.

•Maintain digital security measures across the company: password and secret management, vetted software choices and install sources, spam and phishing awareness.

5. Incident Management & Operations

•Establish and run the incident-response process: on-call rotation, escalation paths, and clear ownership during outages.

•Drive blameless postmortems and track follow-up actions to prevent recurrence.

•Define and monitor SLAs/SLOs and error budgets for the products.

6. Compliance & Data Privacy

•Ensure compliance with relevant data-protection regulations (e.g. GDPR), including data residency and retention.

•Own data-handling policies, especially what user data is sent to third-party LLMs and how it is processed and stored.

•Manage privacy documentation and agreements (privacy policy, terms, DPAs) in coordination with leadership.

7. Team Management & Culture

•Review developers’ work to ensure good code quality, refactoring, and practices, as well as alignment with the product vision and roadmap.

•Organize sprints, divide tasks among peers, and present progress.

•Set deadlines and make sure they are respected; anticipate slippage early and communicate it to help the team adapt.

•Conduct constant gemba walks to understand current blockers on the ground.

•Keep team morale high and maintain a healthy work ecosystem where communication is encouraged and bullying, grudges, and dictatorship are not tolerated.

•Encourage innovation, ownership, and clear, data-driven communication around project performance and issues.

•Lead by example in respecting the manifesto and office rules.

8. Process & Documentation

•Develop and maintain good procedures for the technical team (the manifesto).

•Keep the manifesto and process documentation up to date; address unconsidered edge cases and optimize underperforming processes.

•Maintain clear, current product documentation.

•Communicate any breaches of company policy, process, or manifesto.

9. Hiring & Enablement

•Hire new employees; write entry tests and interview questions.

•Tutor and enable colleagues on AI tools and new operating systems (e.g. building a NixOS flake for the non-technical members of the company).

•Communicate with relevant stakeholders to understand and solve user needs.

10. Customer-Facing & Go-to-Market Support

•Defend and explain the product technically in front of clients and potential investors.

•Support pre-sales and technical due diligence with prospects and partners.

•Handle escalations and technical questions from key accounts.

•Partner with sales, marketing, and product to translate customer needs into the roadmap and to inform go-to-market decisions.

II-Technologies in Use

Languages & Runtimes: TypeScript, Bash, Linux Frontend: React, TanStack Start, TanStack Query, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui & Radix UI, Vite, Vitest Backend: Hono, RPC, BullMQ, better-auth Data: PostgreSQL, Drizzle ORM, S3 Infrastructure & DevOps: Nix, NixOS, Kubernetes, Helm, ArgoCD, Docker, GitHub Actions, Git, Turborepo Observability: kube-prometheus stack.

III-Required Skills

•Software design patterns

•Prompt and context engineering

•LLM application development: model selection, AI evaluation, RAG, and guardrails

•Basic machine learning knowledge

•Practical cloud knowledge and scaling strategies

•Reproducibility (builds, environments)

•Linux and command-line fluency

•Agile methodology and Git workflow

•CI/CD and release engineering

•Asynchronous job and queue design

•Observability and monitoring

•Client/server state management (e.g. Zustand, React Query)

•API and contract design

•Database modeling and migrations (SQL databases)

•Authorization and access-control design

•Unit and integration testing

•Cloud and LLM cost management

•SEO

•Interviewing and Hiring

Nice to Have

•Ease of communication and high self-awareness

•Good posture and non-verbal communication

•Knowledge of mathematical notation and concepts (linear algebra, calculus)

•Understanding of the AI model lifecycle and the inner workings of different AI architectures

•A state-of-the-art general view of AI

•Familiarity with the history of AI and classical approaches (expert systems, ontologies, Lisp, Prolog, etc.)

IV-Benefits

• Join an innovative startup specializing in Artificial Intelligence.

• Play a key role in defining the company’s technology and product strategy.

• Work on real-world projects involving AI, LLMs, and SaaS solutions.

• Enjoy a high level of autonomy and direct impact on technical and strategic decisions.

• Work in an environment that encourages innovation, continuous learning, and initiative.

• Collaborate with a team specialized in AI/ML technologies.

• Contribute to the development and growth of products with international ambitions.