What are the responsibilities and job description for the Chief Technology Officer position at Stealth Startup?
Company Description (Stealth)
The Company is building the permission, identity, and governance layer between AI agents and the web — starting with commerce.
As AI agents move from “assistants” to “actors,” the internet needs new infrastructure to safely allow agents to browse, transact, and operate on behalf of humans. The Company is building that layer.
The Role
This is a true cofounder role, not a senior hire. This is a full-time opportunity based in San Francisco, CA.
You will:
- Architect and build foundational infrastructure from first principles
- Make hard, irreversible early technical decisions
- Co-own product direction with the CEO
- Build the engineering team
- Define technical taste, rigor, and culture
If you want to build something that could become as foundational as Stripe, OAuth, or Cloudflare — but for AI agents, this is that opportunity.
The Technical Problem Space
You will be leading work across:
- Agent identity & attestation
- High-performance request verification & policy enforcement
- Deterministic APIs for agent-native commerce
- Developer-first SDKs (merchant-side & agent-side)
- Distributed systems with strict correctness requirements
- Security, abuse, and adversarial thinking
- Infrastructure that must “just work” at internet scale
This is systems, protocols, security, and product engineering.
Qualifications (Not All Required)
The ideal candidate has deep experience with many of the following:
- E-commerce backends
- Large-scale backend or distributed systems
- API platforms used by external developers
- Security, identity, auth, or cryptographic systems
- Infrastructure / platform products (not internal tools)
- Payments, fintech, or regulated systems
- Developer tooling with strong ergonomics
- Early-stage, VC-backed startups where you owned the architecture
- PhD or MS in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field from a top tier program
Great fits likely come from:
- Stripe, Cloudflare, Google, Meta, Amazon, Snowflake, Plaid
- Infrastructure-focused startups at Series A–C
- Founders or early engineers who have “seen it break at scale”
What We Care About (More Than Resumes)
- First-principles thinking
- Taste — you know what not to build
- Security intuition — you think in threat models naturally
- Product sense — APIs are products to you
- Bias toward clarity
- Agency — you don’t need permission to move
What This Is Not
- Not a role managing a large existing team
- Not a front-end-heavy role
- Not a growth-hacking or experimentation role
- Not a “wait and see” opportunity
This is zero-to-one infrastructure with real stakes.
Equity & Compensation
- Meaningful founder-level equity
- Competitive early-stage salary
- Long-term alignment and shared upside