Founding Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Position Summary We are seeking a Founding Chief Technology Officer to join the leadership team of a new mobile- and AI-first wealth and retirement advisory platform being launched in partnership with major financial institutions and strategic investors. Trust, privacy, and responsible AI usage are the core tenets of our platform identity.
The CTO will be responsible for defining the platform architecture, establishing engineering standards, building the initial technology organization, and ensuring that the platform is designed from day one for ironclad security, privacy-by-design, resilience, consumer scalability, regulatory compliance, and rapid innovation.
This role requires a hands-on technology leader who can operate simultaneously as architect, engineering leader, technical recruiter, and strategic partner to the executive team.
The role combines startup velocity with enterprise-grade engineering discipline.
Core Mission Design and build a platform that:
- Serves millions of users with a highly responsive, consumer-scale experience
- Operates securely and reliably 24x7
- Protects highly sensitive financial and personal information with a strict privacy-first framework
- Integrates with multiple financial and fintech partners
- Supports responsible, explainable, and production-grade AI-driven wealth management capabilities
- Scales from launch to enterprise-level adoption
- Maintains regulatory-grade controls
Key Responsibilities Own Platform Architecture: Establish architecture standards, design and govern the mobile- and AI-first target architecture for the platform including, Application, Cloud, Data, Security, Integration, AI platform, Mobile and web architecture.
Build that supports non-functional requirements including Scalability, Reliability, Availability, Security, Resilience, Maintainability, Observability, and Privacy-by-Design. Specific responsibilities include Multi-region resilience, Disaster recovery, High availability, Performance engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Monitoring and alerting, Capacity planning, and Incident response.
Establish Security and Privacy Framework: Design and implement an ironclad security posture appropriate for a regulated financial platform handling sensitive financial and data - spanning PII protection, identity and access management, zero-trust architecture, encryption strategy, secure development lifecycle, vendor security reviews, responsible AI governance controls (ensuring algorithmic fairness and explainability), data retention policies, and security monitoring and threat detection.
Lead Engineering Execution: Serve as the most senior technical leader - leading technical design reviews, establishing coding standards, evaluating AI-assisted development practices, overseeing engineering quality, ensuring technical debt remains controlled, and personally contributing when necessary - remaining close to architecture and engineering execution rather than operating solely as a manager.
Recruit and Build the Engineering Organization: Build the initial technical team - defining organizational structure and hiring priorities - with likely early hires spanning a Founding/Principal Engineer, Platform Engineer, Full Stack Engineers, Mobile Engineers, Security Engineer, QA/Automation Engineer, Data/AI Engineers, and Site Reliability Engineers.
Work closely with product, design, and AI teams to enable AI-powered functionality, agentic workflows, personalized experiences, LLM orchestration, and AI safety controls as the leader accountable for ensuring AI systems are production-grade, auditable, secure, highly responsive on mobile, and scalable.
Manage Strategic Technology Partners: Serve as the primary technical counterpart to cloud providers, development partners, AI platform vendors, financial services partners, and infrastructure providers - establishing governance and architecture standards across all partner engagements.
Required Experience - 10-20+ years of software engineering experience
- Prior CTO, Chief Architect, VP Engineering, Distinguished Engineer, or Principal Engineer experience
- Experience building cloud-native products
- Experience operating responsive consumer mobile and web applications at large scale (millions of users)
- Experience leading engineering teams
- Experience designing highly available systems
- Experience securing consumer-facing platforms and embedding privacy-by-design principles
- Experience recruiting elite technical talent across mobile, cloud, and data/AI disciplines
Location & Compensation This role is based in the Boston, MA metropolitan area. Compensation includes a competitive base salary and meaningful founding-team equity.
Salary Range: $170,000 - $282,500 Annual
The range quoted above applies to the role in the primary location specified. If the candidate would ultimately work outside of the primary location above, the applicable range could differ.
Employees are eligible to participate in State Street's comprehensive benefits program, which includes: our retirement savings plan (401K) with company match; insurance coverage including basic life, medical, dental, vision, long-term disability, and other optional additional coverages; paid-time off including vacation, sick leave, short term disability, and family care responsibilities; access to our Employee Assistance Program; incentive compensation including eligibility for annual performance-based awards (excluding certain sales roles subject to sales incentive plans); and, eligibility for certain tax advantaged savings plans.
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