Founding CTO: Take technical ownership of the AI platform transforming how UK schools operate

Fancy joining as a founding member of a business with real potential and scalability, right at the point it's about to take off?

Please note: this is an equity-only founding role before LESSO's funding round completes. That does not mean full-time unpaid work until then. Full details on what's expected are set out below.

The company

LESSO is building the trusted AI platform for schools, with the ambition to become the operating layer through which UK education adopts artificial intelligence.

Teachers use LESSO to prepare the planning, resources, communications and admin that would otherwise spill into evenings and weekends. School leaders get one governed environment for AI, with visibility over usage, adoption and impact. Underneath it, we are building the stack around a principle few AI companies are prepared to commit to: UK sovereignty from the infrastructure upwards.

The product is live and already accessible to active users. Structured school pilots are being scheduled for the new academic year to gather measurable adoption, workload and commercial evidence.

LESSO brings the work around teaching into one AI platform. Planning, resources, communications and assessment all share the same context, so teachers do not have to jump between disconnected tools, and school leaders can see how AI is being used. Underneath that simple experience is a much harder engineering problem: agentic AI, persistent context, real-time generation, rich editors, integrations, observability, multi-tenant data and Kubernetes infrastructure.

The long-term challenge is much bigger than building another EdTech product. We want LESSO to become the AI layer schools rely on every day, one that learns from how each school works, gets better with use and lets leaders adopt AI safely at scale.

UK sovereignty is an architectural requirement here, not a compliance badge. LESSO is being built on UK infrastructure, with the goal of keeping the core AI, processing and data layer under UK jurisdiction and control. As CTO, you will take that further across models, compute, storage, resilience and AI infrastructure, and longer term that could include building dedicated AI models for education on a UK sovereign stack.

The role

The next person we recruit will take technical ownership of turning a founder-built platform into infrastructure that thousands of schools and tens of thousands of teachers could eventually rely on.

Luke built the existing product, architecture and infrastructure over the last 18 months as a self-taught technical founder. He will remain closely involved in product direction, AI strategy and company priorities, but he does not want to remain LESSO's senior engineering authority. The incoming CTO will take primary responsibility for engineering, architecture and technical delivery, and is expected to challenge existing decisions, including Luke's, while recognising that the goal is to strengthen a working production platform rather than rewrite it for the sake of personal preference.

The core platform is live in production, and the main teacher and leadership workflows are operational. The immediate priorities are clear: resolve known bugs and edge cases which Luke can point you to, harden the platform for school pilots, improve observability and measurement, deal with technical debt that creates real risk and establish the engineering discipline needed for the next stage.

Responsibilities include:

• Auditing and cleaning up technical debt that creates reliability, maintainability or scaling risk
• Hardening existing frontend workflows and smoothing out anything that still feels prototype-level
• Resolving known bugs, edge cases and integration weaknesses
• Improving production resilience and observability, and auditing the production cluster
• Building out the pilot KPI and evidence layer, so usage, adoption, workload reduction and AI economics can be measured credibly by school and by organisation
• Creating role-specific onboarding flows and a controlled demo environment to support the commercial team
• Owning the wider technical roadmap as LESSO moves from pilot-ready to connected, learning and fully measurable

The package

• This is an equity-bearing co-founder position, not an advisory appointment or early-employee option grant
• LESSO plans to restructure its cap table in December 2026 ahead of opening the pre-seed round, and your equity position will be negotiated based on experience, fit, pre-raise contribution, technical ownership and your commitment to join full-time once funded
• A competitive market salary once the funding round completes, with flexibility for the right candidate
• A genuine seat at the table shaping category-defining technology, not just executing someone else's spec
• You inherit a functioning production platform without an incumbent engineering hierarchy or sacred architecture, with the authority to decide what survives scale, what needs strengthening and what eventually needs replacing
• Remote working
• Direct, hands-on partnership with the founder, not a layer of management between you and the mission

Before the raise

This is an equity-only founding role before the raise, but we are not asking someone to leave an existing role immediately and work full-time without salary until funding lands. Luke is currently working full-time alongside building LESSO and understands the realities of building a company at this stage.

The immediate priority is getting LESSO technically ready for its September school pilots. For an experienced technical leader, we estimate the initial audit, priority bug fixes, measurement layer and pilot-readiness work at approximately 30 hours. Beyond that point, the pre-funding commitment will be agreed around your circumstances and the needs of the company. We expect meaningful technical ownership and contribution before the raise, with the role becoming full-time when the funding round closes, or earlier where circumstances allow.

To be successful, you will…

• Have exited a business or operate as a fractional CTO, ideally with the flexibility to take on a focused, well-defined pre-raise commitment before transitioning full-time
• Be as comfortable in frontend architecture, interaction design and accessibility as you are in backend systems, APIs and infrastructure
• Naturally ask about data relationships, state, feedback loops, latency and human decision points, not just which framework to use
• Be excited by persistent context, agent workflows, semantic memory and making sophisticated technology feel simple to the end user
• Operate well with incomplete information and no existing playbook
• Care about the responsibility that comes with handling sensitive educational data
• Want ownership, not a job description. You'll be expected to challenge, decide, and build beyond a narrow remit

Apply!

If you've built something before and want to build something bigger, with real skin in the game, get in touch.