Chief Technology Officer

Chief Technology Officer | YC-Backed Startup | NYC In-Office

Shields Group Search is partnering with a YC-backed startup hiring a Chief Technology Officer to join full-time in New York City. This is a rare opportunity to step into a founder-level technical leadership role at a fast-growing, capital-efficient AI company working with some of the largest investment firms in the world.

About the Company

Our client partners with the largest investment firms in the world and their portfolio companies to get their data ready for agents.

They have grown from $0 to $1.2M in ARR in 11 months and are moving from a pure-product motion to a forward-deployed engineering model.

For example, they help a large software PE portfolio company structure the data trapped in their contracts, including pricing, renewals, and change-of-control terms, into clean form for M&A data migrations. What used to take a services team months now takes their agents days.

Every large enterprise is racing to put Claude, GPT, and other frontier models on top of their data. The bottleneck is no longer the model. It is the data underneath.

No off-the-shelf product reads enterprise documents end-to-end with the accuracy regulated workflows demand. Tables span pages. Formats vary by counterparty. OCR is unreliable. Audit and compliance teams need cell-level provenance.

This is not a self-serve doc parser. Their forward-deployed engineers embed with each customer, configure agents to their specific data and workflows, and own the outcome end-to-end. The work is harder, the relationships are deeper, and the moat compounds with every workbook they deliver.

Customer Segments

Investment Firms

PE and credit fund accounting teams, fund administrators, KPOs, and deal teams at investment banks.

Use cases include:

• Capital account spreading
• Subscription doc and K-1 processing
• Loan tape ingestion
• Deal-level diligence extraction

Portfolio Companies

PE firms own hundreds of operating companies and are under intense pressure to deliver AI-led value creation across them.

Use cases include:

• M&A data migration
• Contract structuring
• Vendor invoice processing
• AR / AP automation
• ERP cutovers

Unfair Advantage

80% of the top 20 PE funds in the world are already customers. Deal teams are connecting the company to operating partners who are actively deploying the product into their portfolio companies, where the forward-deployed engineering team runs the rollouts. They get warm-introduced by the GP.

Company Snapshot

• YC-backed
• $0 to $1.2M ARR in 11 months
• Last round priced at a $40M cap
• Lean team of 8 in NYC
• Capital-efficient and growing fast

The founding CTO built the technical foundation that got the company here and is moving on to his next chapter. The company is now hiring his successor to scale the engineering org from here.

The Role

You will own engineering end-to-end.

Architecture

• Set the technical direction for the agentic platform and the data infrastructure underneath. Drive the hard problems: high-accuracy extraction at scale, evals, schema mapping, agentic orchestration, and the data plumbing into customer systems of record.

Forward-Deployed Engineering

• Build out and lead the FDE function that runs every customer engagement. This is the muscle that delivers the outcomes customers pay for, and the reason the company wins against horizontal infrastructure.

Hiring

• Recruit and scale the engineering team beyond the current 4 engineers. The company has a strong inbound pipeline and clear conviction on who they want.

Customer-Facing Technical Leadership

• Work directly with CTOs, CISOs, and heads of engineering at top-tier investment firms, plus CFOs and operations leaders at portfolio companies, on integrations, security reviews, and SOC 2 commitments.

Product Partnership

• Partner with the product co-founder on roadmap, prioritization, and the build vs. buy calls that matter.

Founder-Level Ownership

• Sit in every important conversation: sales, customer success, board, and fundraising.

What They Are Looking For

• Former founder or CTO
• You have built and run a venture-backed startup before, ideally one that scaled. You know what it takes to go from 4 engineers to 30, and what it takes to be the technical face of the company in front of customers and investors.
• Deep experience building production AI / LLM systems
• Ideally agentic systems with high accuracy bars, not just RAG.
• Comfort operating at the intersection of unstructured input and structured output
• Document AI, OCR, table extraction, schema mapping, evals, and the harness that holds it all together.
• Track record of delivering into demanding enterprise customers at high velocity
• Willing to be in the office 5 days a week in NYC

Bonus Experience

• Experience with forward-deployed engineering or solutions architecture motions, such as Palantir FDE, Scale FDE, Ramp Solutions, etc.
• Background scaling engineering teams from sub-10 to 30+
• Open source contributions to AI / LLM agent tooling

Compensation

• Base: ~ $200,000+
• Equity: Up to 10%, founder-level grant
• Latest valuation cap: $40M
• Full health, dental, vision, and 401(k)
• Top-tier hardware and tools