Field CTO, AI

Avahi•San Francisco, CA

4d•Remote

About The Position

Avahi is an AWS Premier partner with a fast-growing GenAI practice, seeking a technical leader to own the AI conversation externally with customers, AWS, and in print. This role is not hands-on-keyboard but requires credibility from shipping real AI systems. The Field CTO will be the public face of Avahi's AI point of view and lead the field and solutions team to convert strategic conversations into signed work. This role partners with the CTO (platform, delivery, engineering excellence) and CRO (revenue) to bridge platform engineering and revenue execution, ensuring sold solutions are buildable.

Requirements

15+ years in enterprise technology, with at least 5 years focused on AI/ML, GenAI, or applied data science at scale.
Proven experience shipping real AI systems, even if not currently writing production code.
Field CTO, Principal SA, or VP-level customer-facing experience from a major cloud provider (AWS, another hyperscaler), AI platform company (Databricks, Snowflake, OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere), or top-tier consultancy.
Extensive experience leading hundreds of enterprise AI conversations.
Deep understanding of the AWS AI/ML stack, including Bedrock, SageMaker, Q, and agentic services, at an architectural level.
Established network within AWS partner and AI/ML teams.
Strong executive presence, capable of commanding attention from Fortune 500 CIOs and large conference audiences.
Proven ability to build and manage technical pre-sales or solutions engineering teams of 10-30 people, with a track record of effective hiring and coaching.
Business fluency, including understanding P&Ls, services unit economics, deal margins, utilization, and pipeline development.
A bias for action, prioritizing prototypes and POCs over polished presentations.

Nice To Haves

Experience in services or consulting leadership at scale.
Published author, recognized conference speaker, or established industry voice in AI/ML.
Existing relationships with AWS AI/ML partner leadership.
Experience selling into regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services.

Responsibilities

Define Avahi's AI/GenAI go-to-market strategy, including target industries, use cases, buyer personas, and leading AWS services, with quarterly refreshes.
Serve as the senior technical voice in major enterprise pursuits, leading AI strategy discussions with CXOs and enterprise architects, and translating AI concepts into deployable architectures.
Build strong relationships with AWS solutions architects, partner managers, and AI specialists to ensure Avahi's inclusion in AWS-led AI opportunity scoping.
Author Avahi's AI point of view through long-form content (whitepapers, co-authored AWS content) and short-form content (LinkedIn, keynotes), and speak at industry events like re:Invent and Summits.
Lead the team responsible for building demos, conducting Proofs of Concept (POCs), and providing technical sales support, aiming to elevate customer-facing solutions and execution speed.
Develop and maintain a portfolio of working AI demos and reference architectures that are valuable to customers and AWS sellers.
Collaborate with the CTO and CRO to align platform engineering capabilities with sales execution, ensuring alignment between what is sold and what can be built.