Chief Technology Officer, MD

State Street•Boston, MA

3d•Onsite

About The Position

We are seeking a Founding Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to join the leadership team of a new mobile- and AI-first wealth and retirement advisory platform being launched in partnership with major financial institutions and strategic investors. Trust, privacy, and responsible AI usage are the core tenets of our platform identity. The CTO will be responsible for defining the platform architecture, establishing engineering standards, building the initial technology organization, and ensuring that the platform is designed from day one for ironclad security, privacy-by-design, resilience, consumer scalability, regulatory compliance, and rapid innovation. This role requires a hands-on technology leader who can operate simultaneously as architect, engineering leader, technical recruiter, and strategic partner to the executive team. The role combines startup velocity with enterprise-grade engineering discipline.

Requirements

10–20+ years of software engineering experience
Prior CTO, Chief Architect, VP Engineering, Distinguished Engineer, or Principal Engineer experience
Experience building cloud-native products
Experience operating responsive consumer mobile and web applications at large scale (millions of users)
Experience leading engineering teams
Experience designing highly available systems
Experience securing consumer-facing platforms and embedding privacy-by-design principles
Experience recruiting elite technical talent across mobile, cloud, and data/AI disciplines

Responsibilities

Own Platform Architecture: Establish architecture standards, design and govern the mobile- and AI-first target architecture for the platform including, Application, Cloud, Data, Security, Integration, AI platform, Mobile and web architecture. Build that supports non-functional requirements including Scalability, Reliability, Availability, Security, Resilience, Maintainability, Observability, and Privacy-by-Design. Specific responsibilities include Multi-region resilience, Disaster recovery, High availability, Performance engineering, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Monitoring and alerting, Capacity planning, and Incident response.
Establish Security and Privacy Framework: Design and implement an ironclad security posture appropriate for a regulated financial platform handling sensitive financial and data — spanning PII protection, identity and access management, zero-trust architecture, encryption strategy, secure development lifecycle, vendor security reviews, responsible AI governance controls (ensuring algorithmic fairness and explainability), data retention policies, and security monitoring and threat detection.
Lead Engineering Execution: Serve as the most senior technical leader — leading technical design reviews, establishing coding standards, evaluating AI-assisted development practices, overseeing engineering quality, ensuring technical debt remains controlled, and personally contributing when necessary — remaining close to architecture and engineering execution rather than operating solely as a manager.
Recruit and Build the Engineering Organization: Build the initial technical team — defining organizational structure and hiring priorities — with likely early hires spanning a Founding/Principal Engineer, Platform Engineer, Full Stack Engineers, Mobile Engineers, Security Engineer, QA/Automation Engineer, Data/AI Engineers, and Site Reliability Engineers.
Work closely with product, design, and AI teams to enable AI-powered functionality, agentic workflows, personalized experiences, LLM orchestration, and AI safety controls as the leader accountable for ensuring AI systems are production-grade, auditable, secure, highly responsive on mobile, and scalable.
Manage Strategic Technology Partners: Serve as the primary technical counterpart to cloud providers, development partners, AI platform vendors, financial services partners, and infrastructure providers — establishing governance and architecture standards across all partner engagements.

Benefits

competitive base salary
meaningful founding-team equity
retirement savings plan (401K) with company match
insurance coverage including basic life, medical, dental, vision, long-term disability, and other optional additional coverages
paid-time off including vacation, sick leave, short term disability, and family care responsibilities
access to our Employee Assistance Program
incentive compensation including eligibility for annual performance-based awards
eligibility for certain tax advantaged savings plans
inclusive development opportunities
flexible work-life support
paid volunteer days
vibrant employee networks