Chief Technology Officer in London

About governr

governr is the AI control infrastructure for regulated industries, with a primary focus on financial services, healthcare and government. We give enterprises the visibility, control, and audit trail they need to deploy AI agents responsibly. Our platform covers AI discovery and inventory (AI Atlas), continuous monitoring and action auditing, and full decision accountability records. As regulatory pressure on AI grows, and AI adoption accelerates this creates increasing material business risk and regulatory scrutiny, and governr is purpose built to help these firms respond.

The Role

We're looking for a CTO to set the technical direction for governr and own how we build. This is a founding-team level role, working directly with the founders to make the big calls on architecture, engineering standards, and how we scale the platform as the business grows. You'll be as comfortable in a customer conversation as you are in a technical design review.

What you'll do

• Set and own the technical vision and architecture for the governr platform, making decisions that are ambitious enough to scale and pragmatic enough to ship.
• Lead and grow the engineering function, setting standards for how the team works, how code is written, and how quality is maintained.
• Work closely with the Product Manager and founders to align technical direction with product priorities and customer commitments.
• Make the right calls on build versus buy, tooling, infrastructure, and technical debt, especially in the early stages when those decisions are hard to undo.
• Represent the technical capability of governr in customer and investor conversations, speaking credibly about how the platform works and where it's going.
• Drive the adoption of AI agents within the product and set the standard for how the engineering team uses AI coding tools day to day.
• Stay close to the regulatory and security requirements of financial services clients, ensuring the platform is built to the standards they need.

What we're looking for

• Proven CTO or equivalent experience at an early-stage fintech or regulated technology business, with a track record of building products from the ground up.
• Deep technical expertise across cloud infrastructure, data architecture, and security, with hands-on experience building enterprise-grade platforms.
• Strong understanding of the financial services, and/or another regulated verticals including what regulated enterprises expect from a tech partner in terms of security, reliability, and compliance.
• Experience building and leading engineering teams, including setting technical standards, hiring, and creating a culture of quality and accountability.
• Comfortable operating at both the strategic and the detail level, able to set direction one day and get into the weeds of a technical problem the next.
• Clear communicator who can translate complex technical decisions for non-technical founders, customers, and investors.
• A genuine interest and experience in AI and agentic systems, and a considered view on how to build with them responsibly.

Preferrable but not essential

• Experience building AI or ML powered products.
• Familiarity with AI risk frameworks or regulatory requirements such as the EU AI Act or FCA guidance.
• Experience with AWS Bedrock, Azure AI Foundry, or similar enterprise AI platforms.
• Background in cybersecurity or data privacy in a regulated context.

Why join

AI control infra is shifting from a nice-to-have to a core regulatory and business risk management requirement, and financial services firms are at the sharp end of that. This is a rare opportunity. Autonomy. Building cutting edge. Solving a problem that's commercially urgent and genuinely interesting. Sharp team, high trust, and direct access to founders and customers from day one. If you want to build something that matters from the ground up, you're in the right place.