CTO - Chief Technology Officer

c3 is a deep tech company building a spatial intelligence data layer for the physical world. We operate at the intersection of computer vision, spatial computing, sensing technology, and cryptographic data integrity. Our work is technically ambitious, commercially significant, and largely without direct precedent.

We are pre-Series A, founder-led, and based between London and Kyiv. The founding team is small by design. We are not building a feature roadmap — we are building infrastructure that other products and markets will depend on. The engineering problems we are solving are genuinely hard and the data asset we are creating is genuinely novel.

This is not a role for someone who wants to manage a large team and attend planning ceremonies. It is a role for someone who wants to define the technical architecture of something that does not exist yet, hire the people who will build it, and be accountable for every significant technical decision made along the way.

1. The role:

You will be the first senior technical hire at c3. You will report directly to the founder and hold full ownership of the technical vision, architecture, and engineering team.

In the first six months you will:

• Audit and assess the existing codebase, infrastructure, and ML pipeline inherited from the initial build phase — make clear-eyed decisions about what to keep, what to rebuild, and what to discard
• Define the technical architecture across the full stack — mobile capture, cloud processing, ML inference pipeline, temporal data storage, cryptographic integrity, and API layer
• Make the first three to four engineering hires alongside the founder — senior ML/CV engineer, senior backend engineer, and iOS engineer — and own those hiring decisions fully
• Establish engineering practices, tooling, and standards from scratch — version control, CI/CD, code review, documentation — appropriate for a small high-output team, not a large enterprise
• Translate c3's core technical concepts into language that investors, partners, and regulators can engage with — you will be present in external conversations where the technical credibility of c3 is being assessed

From month six onwards you will:

• Own the technical roadmap and its execution across a growing team
• Lead the architecture of multi-source data capture, temporal analytics, change detection, and fraud prevention systems
• Build relationships with the Kyiv deep tech and academic community to support future hiring
• Contribute to IP strategy alongside the founder and legal counsel — c3 has active patent filings and the CTO will be central to future filings
• Define and own c3's data integrity model — immutability, cryptographic anchoring, audit trail — which underpins the commercial and legal value of the platform

2. What we are looking for:

Technical foundation

• Proven experience architecting and shipping production-grade data infrastructure systems — you have built things that handle real load, real failure, and real data integrity requirements
• Deep understanding of distributed systems design — event sourcing, immutable data architectures, append-only stores, or equivalent patterns where correctness is non-negotiable
• Strong working knowledge of ML systems in production — not research familiarity, but genuine experience integrating ML inference pipelines into backend infrastructure at scale
• Comfortable across the cloud infrastructure layer — AWS-native, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, monitoring, and cost management
• Experience with or strong understanding of cryptographic integrity patterns — blockchain anchoring, hash-based verification, or equivalent approaches to tamper-evident data systems

• Familiarity with spatial computing, computer vision, or sensing systems is a significant advantage — experience with point cloud processing, 3D data pipelines, or real-world capture systems is highly valued

   

Leadership and ownership

• You have led or co-led engineering teams in an early-stage environment where technical decisions compound fast and reversing them is expensive
• You hire well — you know what good looks like across ML, backend, and mobile engineering, and you can assess it quickly and accurately
• You write and speak clearly — architecture decisions, technical documentation, and investor conversations all require the same underlying clarity

• You are comfortable with ambiguity and honest about what you do not know — c3 is building in territory where the answers are not always established

   

Personal disposition

• You are genuinely motivated by hard technical problems in physical-world data — sensing, spatial reasoning, and real-world data capture interest you independently of this role
• You want to build something from the ground up and accept the instability and opportunity that comes with that
• You are based in Kyiv or willing to relocate — this is an office-based role and the Kyiv engineering community is central to how we hire and operate

• You take long-term ownership seriously — you are not looking for a twelve-month stint, you are looking for the thing you want to spend the next four or five years building

   

3. What we offer:

• Competitive salary reflecting genuine seniority — range discussed directly and transparently at first conversation
• Meaningful equity stake — you are joining as a founding team member, not a senior employee, and the package reflects that
• Full technical ownership — no existing CTO to report to, no inherited architecture you are obligated to preserve, no committees to persuade
• A Kyiv office environment that reflects the seriousness and culture of the work — small, focused, and built around the team
• Direct and ongoing involvement in IP strategy, investor conversations, and company direction — this is a seat at the table, not a delivery function
• The founder is based in Kyiv and operationally present — you will not be managing upwards across time zones or through intermediaries