Chief Technology Officer

This is a technical leadership role for a start-up in hyper growth. As CTO, you will own the technical strategy and end-to-end delivery of the Agent OS platform; the build, the deployment engineering, and the security and compliance posture on which the company’s growth depends.

You will build and scale the engineering organisation through a period of rapid growth to many dozens of engineers, while holding a weekly release train, and front the technical diligence for our Series A; the point at which our air-gapped and HPE PCAI deployment claims must stand up to institutional scrutiny.

You will own the security and compliance posture, with a planned separation of the CISO mandate as the function matures. This is a build-stage role, not a slide-stage one: you build through others but stay hands-on across architecture reviews, incident command, and the code itself, working as a genuine peer to the Head of Product and the founding team.

What You’ll Do

• Own the technical strategy and end-to-end delivery of the Agent OS platform: the build, deployment engineering, and security and compliance posture.
• Build and scale the engineering organisation across product and platform through rapid, multi-dozen growth, while keeping a weekly release train.
• Run fleet operations for single-tenant deployments: automated provisioning, upgrade trains, observability, and incident response across tens of isolated customer environments.
• Own security architecture and build compliance in as a product feature: zero-trust agent identities, EU AI Act audit trails, human oversight, and data residency.
• Front technical diligence for the Series A and lead enterprise security audits where applicable.
• Hold joint-roadmap and reference-architecture conversations with HPE, NVIDIA, and WWT engineering teams.
• Partner with the Head of Product, and represent Deliverance customer-facing at CTO-to-CTO level in defence, health, telco, and sovereign accounts.

Must-Haves

• 12+ years in engineering, including 5+ leading and scaling teams through significant growth at a B2B infrastructure or enterprise platform company.
• Shipped and operated production LLM/agentic systems at enterprise scale: multi-provider model routing, permission-trimmed RAG, and agent orchestration with human-in-the-loop controls (not a GenAI-strategy background).
• Deep Kubernetes and multi-cloud engineering (AWS, Azure, GCP) plus on-prem and private-cloud delivery: HPE PCAI and NVIDIA DGX, or a credible equivalent (OpenShift, sovereign cloud, defence infrastructure).
• Run fleet operations for single-tenant software: automated provisioning, upgrade trains, observability, and incident response across tens of isolated deployments.
• Strong distributed-systems and data-platform fundamentals: event-driven services, Postgres at scale, and vector/hybrid search.
• Owns security architecture credibly, from zero-trust design and secrets management through to hardening in production, with a track record delivering ISO 27001 and SOC 2.
• Shipped into air-gapped or classified environments, and eligible for UK SC clearance (non-negotiable for the defence workstream).

Nice-to-Haves

• ISO 42001 experience.
• UK DV clearance.
• Has taken a company through institutional technical diligence or enterprise security audits.
• Scale-up (Series A to C) stage experience, and familiarity with SLM fine-tuning and GPU infrastructure.