About This Role
This role offers a front-row seat to the creation of the next decade's most important companies, working directly with early-stage founders to design and implement technical architectures. It suits a builder with strong founder empathy who can act as a fractional CTO, guiding startups through critical technical and business decisions across diverse sectors like AI/ML, FinTech, and ClimateTech.
Responsibilities
- Act as a trusted technical advisor to a portfolio of early-stage founders, designing architectures that are right-sized for where they are today and built to grow if and when they scale
- Get hands-on: prototype, build reference patterns, and demo working solutions alongside founders rather than handing them a generic playbook
- Help founders understand and improve the architectures their coding agents generated, making sense of the decisions and tradeoffs baked into what they've already shipped
- Help startups navigate the fast-moving GenAI landscape, from selecting the right foundation models and AI services to shipping production-ready AI-powered products
- Guide founders through the real challenges of building GenAI applications, including model cost, latency, accuracy, safety, and AI best practices
- Help founders make pragmatic build-and-scale decisions, including when to keep architectures disposable and adaptable while the direction is still being validated
- Stay technically sharp by experimenting with new models, agent frameworks, and emerging tools, so you can advise credibly across the entire stack
- Build and deepen relationships across San Francisco's startup ecosystem, including top accelerators like Y Combinator, incubators, and leading VC firms
- Be a voice for your founders, connecting their feedback and needs directly to AWS product and engineering teams to shape the tools being built for them
- Scout emerging technology trends across the startups you work with and translate those signals back into AWS product roadmaps
- Share your expertise at startup events, demo days, and developer meetups across the San Francisco ecosystem to build trust and visibility in the community
Requirements
- 4+ years of specific technology domain areas (e.g. software development, cloud computing, systems engineering, infrastructure, security, networking, data & analytics) experience
- 2+ years of design, implementation, or consulting in applications and infrastructures experience
- Experience with designing and building application using AWS services such as Lambda, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Kubernetes
- Experience conveying complex technical concepts to both technical and business audiences
- Hands-on experience building with GenAI, such as foundation models, agents, RAG, or fine-tuning, in a prototype or production setting
