Fractional CTO

Fractional CTO – IKAI

Location: Remote / Dubai, UAE (flexible)
Experience: 10+ years (including 3–5 years leading teams/architecture)
Employment Type: Fractional (part-time, contract/retainer)

About IKAI

IKAI is an AI-powered platform transforming how consulting firms and enterprises build proposals and presentations. We combine secure, on-prem/virtual-private deployments with cutting-edge AI (RAG, agents) and a delightful UX to help teams work smarter, faster, and with higher impact.

The Role

We’re hiring a Fractional CTO to set technical direction, ship product with a small team, and establish the engineering practices that will carry IKAI from MVP to enterprise scale. You’ll own architecture and delivery across our React/TypeScript front end and TypeScript/Node back end, guide AI integration (RAG, agents, orchestration), and build the foundations for reliability, security, and cost-efficient scale.

Responsibilities

• Architecture & Roadmap
  • Define and evolve the platform architecture (FE/BE/services, data, LLM/RAG layers, observability) aligned to product milestones.
  • Select and standardize core technologies (TypeScript/Node, React, vector DBs, orchestration frameworks, CI/CD, IaC).
• AI Platform & Productization
  • Lead integration of LLMs (RAG, agents, prompt/eval loops, safety/guardrails), vector search, and slide/document pipelines.
  • Establish latency, cost, and quality targets; implement caching, streaming, and evaluation harnesses.
• Security, Compliance & Data Governance
  • Set baselines for tenant isolation, encryption, secret management, audit logging, and access controls (SSO/SAML/OIDC/RBAC).
  • Chart a practical path toward SOC 2/ISO 27001 readiness and UAE/EU data-sovereignty expectations.
• Delivery Excellence
  • Define SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, and release processes; stand up monitoring/alerting (OpenTelemetry/Prometheus/Grafana/Sentry).
  • Drive code quality (standards, reviews, testing strategy, performance budgets).
• Team Leadership
  • Manage and mentor the FE Developer (React/Node) and BE Engineer (TypeScript/AI); grow a pragmatic hiring plan.
  • Run lightweight rituals (planning, tech reviews, incident/post-mortems) and coach for ownership and speed.
• Hands-On Contribution
  • Pair program on critical paths; review PRs; prototype tricky pieces (e.g., streaming APIs, RAG evaluators, PPTX pipelines).
• Stakeholder & Customer Facing
  • Join key partner/client calls, translate requirements into technical plans/SOWs, and de-risk enterprise deployments.
• Vendor & Cost Management
  • Evaluate build-vs-buy; negotiate vendor terms; monitor cloud/GPU/token spend and optimize for unit economics.

Requirements

• Proven leadership: 10+ years in software engineering with 3–5+ years as CTO/Head of Engineering/Principal Architect in SaaS or data/AI products.
• Full-stack depth: Expert in TypeScript/Node.js and strong command of React fundamentals; comfortable reading/writing Python for data/LLM tooling.
• AI in production: Built or led systems with RAG/agents, embeddings/vector search, prompt/eval pipelines, and streaming UX.
• Cloud & DevOps: Solid with AWS/Azure/GCP, Docker/Kubernetes, CI/CD (GitHub Actions), and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/Helm).
• Data & storage: Postgres/SQL + Redis; experience with vector databases (e.g., pgvector, Milvus, Pinecone).
• Security mindset: Practical experience with SSO/SAML/OIDC, secrets, key management, logging/monitoring, and compliance road-mapping.
• Execution & communication: Startup-speed delivery, crisp written/spoken communication, and comfort with client-facing discussions (pre-sales/solutioning).
• Timezone overlap: Able to maintain meaningful overlap with Gulf Standard Time (Dubai).

Nice-to-Haves (Bonus Points)

• PPTX/Office ecosystem experience (Office JS, pptxgen, python-pptx) and slide rendering/templating at scale.
• Experience with LangChain/LlamaIndex, vLLM/Triton, LiteLLM/Mastra, or comparable orchestration layers.
• On-prem / air-gapped enterprise deployments, Azure AD/SCIM provisioning, and SIEM integrations.
• Prior work in enterprise SaaS or B2B productivity platforms; GCC/MENA enterprise exposure.

Engagement Model

• Capacity: 10–20 hours/week to start (flex as milestones demand).
• Cadence: Weekly leadership sync; bi-weekly architecture/roadmap review; availability for critical incidents and key client calls.
• Initial 90-Day Outcomes:
  • v1 Architecture & Security Baseline (diagrams, data flows, IAM, SLOs).
  • AI/RAG blueprint with evaluation harness and cost/latency targets.
  • CI/CD & IaC in place; logging/metrics/tracing live.
  • Hiring plan + interview rubrics for FE/BE + first key hires onboarded.
  • MVP → Pilot delivery plan with risk register and cut-criteria.

What We Offer

• Opportunity to shape IKAI’s technical strategy and ship an AI-first product used by leading consulting teams.
• A flexible fractional engagement with real ownership and the option to scale up.
• Close collaboration with a focused founder team, design partners, and enterprise users.
• Competitive fractional compensation (retainer + milestone bonuses; equity negotiable).