Chief Technology Officer

Parallax•Denver, CO

6d•Onsite

About The Position

Parallax Innovations is a Denver-based civic communications lab incubated by Unite America. It builds persuasion infrastructure for organizations and campaigns advancing nonpartisan democracy reforms, combining technology, data, and services to help partners reach, engage, and persuade voters. Its work includes a narrative intelligence platform, support for vertical-video operations, tools that help supporters create content, and voter-file data assets with audience-specific insights. Its primary focus is advancing open primaries and addressing the exclusion and incentives created by party primaries. The Chief Technology Officer owns the ongoing development and improvement of Parallax’s narrative intelligence platform, its primary competitive advantage. The role has responsibility for engineering, AI, data, privacy and compliance, infrastructure, and security, and has significant influence over adjacent workflows. The CTO will craft the product vision, lead contract engineers, make decisions about architecture, models, data, and resources, and communicate the technical vision and investment needs to executive leadership, the Board, and potential investors. The CTO will inherit a contract data and engineering team and determine how it develops, including budget and hiring. The platform’s ambition is to form a closed-loop learning system that connects created content with engagement data, audience research, and experiments. It should learn which messages, messengers, and formats work with different voters and feed those lessons into future content creation, targeting, and distribution. The CTO will establish how the platform measures persuasion, develop capabilities to evaluate video as well as transcripts, and ensure findings are validated, appropriately qualified, and usable by creative teams and partner organizations. As a senior organizational leader, the CTO will work with the President, Chief of Staff, and VP of Product & Partnerships to set strategy, translate priorities into work plans and budgets, and align teams around measurable results. The role reports to the President and is based in Denver. Relocation is welcome; exceptional candidates elsewhere may be considered if they can make periodic trips to Denver. In the first 60 days, success means facilitating a shared platform vision, establishing a leadership-approved roadmap and clear technical ownership, and putting an initial scoring framework in place for week-to-week experimentation. In the first six months, success means establishing a working feedback loop between content, audience, and outcome data; testing initial scoring and predictive capabilities against results; beginning integrations with the partner voter file and Partner Portal; and enabling teams to use findings to improve communications with clear measures and priorities.

Requirements

12+ years in engineering, machine learning, AI, or data product roles, including several years leading technical teams.
Background in technical leadership and executive accountability.
Recent record of shipping AI or data products using current tools and methods that people have used to make real decisions.
Experience aligning multiple functions, managing senior leaders, making resource tradeoffs, and communicating strategy and results to a board or investors.
Experience taking a data or AI product from an early version to a product an organization relies on.
High integrity and commitment to accuracy, privacy, and responsible AI use; willingness not to overstate what a model knows.
Low-ego, curious approach that lets results challenge prior assumptions and gives credit freely.
Builder mindset and willingness to work alongside the team, including demonstrating prototypes and raising the team’s technical standard.
Comfort working in a small, early-stage organization where plans are still being developed.
Fluency with modern AI tools, including LLM APIs, multimodal models for video, image, and audio, retrieval, prompt and agent design, model routing, and fine-tuning tradeoffs.
A method for testing and experimenting with new models, harnesses, and tools as they are released.
Practical experience with evaluation and measurement, including building evaluation sets, back-testing, A/B testing, experimental design, and causal inference sufficient to distinguish engagement from persuasion.
Hands-on technical ability to write Python and SQL, design data pipelines, and review team code and architecture.
Product sense to translate the needs of creative teams and partners into roadmaps and specifications and decide what not to build.
Ability to explain how products and tools work, including their current limitations, to nontechnical audiences such as creatives, leadership, and funders.
Genuine motivation for democracy reform, healthy elections, and electoral integrity.
Cross-partisan outlook and ability to work respectfully with people from different political perspectives.
Understanding that different voter groups may respond differently to the same political message, and curiosity about the science of persuasion.

Nice To Haves

Experience supporting founders or principals in raising capital or philanthropic funding.
Background in AI startups, intelligent platform engineering, AI-assisted political analytics, media analytics, or adtech engineering.
Experience in govtech, civic tech, political work, or ballot-initiative work.
Political or ballot-initiative experience is helpful but not required; political relationships are not required.

Responsibilities

Own the development of Parallax’s core technology and competitive advantage.
Set the platform strategy and capabilities roadmap, including what the platform measures, its learning agenda, the inputs it uses, and how it improves over time.
Define how content engagement and persuasion are quantified, weighted, and connected to real-world outcomes.
Extend the intelligence platform beyond transcript analysis to evaluate video visuals, presenters, formats, and production choices.
Select and route among commercial and open models, evaluating whether fine-tuning or custom components are worthwhile and balancing cost, speed, and accuracy.
Build a data feedback loop that incorporates performance data from platforms, partners, audience surveys, and experiments.
Oversee dashboards and reporting that explain platform performance to internal and partner audiences.
Ensure compliance with data laws and articulate and uphold AI ethics guidelines, including a prohibition on deceptive or synthetic content.
Design and run platform validation, including back-testing historical content, comparing predictions with actual results, and checking findings against survey and experimental evidence, including RCTs.
Build evaluations and guardrails that enable the platform to learn within defined limits and produce trusted, explainable outputs.
Communicate what the platform can and cannot establish, and the confidence in its findings, to leadership, funders, and partners.
Translate platform findings into clear weekly guidance for the creative team on frames, formats, messengers, and audiences.
Work with the Creative studio and Partners team to map tested messages and audiences across active campaigns, identify what is working, and surface gaps.
Help partner organizations and campaign teams use Parallax’s intelligence to create more persuasive content.
Shape the roadmap for internal tools and products so they interoperate effectively with the core platform, working with the teams that build and deploy them.
Take over the contractor-based data and engineering team and determine what to keep, build, or buy.
Own team development, budget, and hiring in collaboration with leadership.
Build alongside the team using modern AI tools and establish standards for responsible AI use.
Help the President and leadership team set organizational strategy and work with the Chief of Staff and VP of Product & Partnerships on organization-wide initiatives.
Champion the technical vision, progress, and investment requirements to executive leadership, the Board, and potential investors.