CTO

Company Description

Whitebox is a European deep-tech company building infrastructure for the next generation of AI — the layer that makes advanced systems legible, trustworthy, and safe to deploy in the real world. We work at the intersection of AI safety, systems engineering, and the science of how increasingly capable AI actually behaves. Our commercial focus is regulated markets where trust, auditability, and accountability are not optional. Our intellectual ambition is larger than that, and we'll share more once there's mutual fit.

Role Description

This is a full-time remote role for a founding Chief Technology Officer. The CTO will own the technical direction end-to-end: architecture, the first hires, and the research-to-product translation that sits at the heart of what we do. Day-to-day responsibilities include designing the core systems, writing code, setting the technical bar, building a small senior team, and working directly with the founder and advisory board to shape the roadmap. This is a player-coach role, not a pure management role — we expect the CTO to remain hands-on.

Qualifications

• Proven expertise in software architecture and distributed systems, ideally in AI-native products
• Hands-on experience with at least some of: LLM internals, post-training, agentic systems, model-serving infrastructure, interpretability, active inference, or cognitive architectures
• Track record shipping technology into regulated, audit-heavy, or high-stakes environments
• Experience building engineering teams from zero and setting a high technical bar
• Comfort working in genuine epistemic uncertainty — turning contested concepts into measurable, auditable signals
• Exceptional written clarity and the ability to reason publicly about hard technical and intellectual trade-offs
• Serious interest in AI safety as an engineering discipline; interest in consciousness science, AI welfare, or philosophy of mind is a significant plus
• Ability to work effectively in a small, senior, remote-first team across European time zones