Chief Technology Officer (AI & Engineering)

About the role

Toptal, a global network of top talent in business, design and technology, is hiring a Chief Technology Officer for a remote position. The CTO drives execution for the product and engineering teams and puts AI at the core of everything the company builds, owning the full technical architecture and making it AI-first. The role is open to candidates who submit resumes and communicate in English.

Key responsibilities

• Own the AI technology strategy and architecture: model selection and fine-tuning, harness design, orchestration, retrieval, context engineering, tool and MCP integration, guardrails, evaluation and cost control, exposed as primitives for other teams.
• Deploy agentic engineering at scale across matching, vetting, onboarding, delivery and internal operations, make AI quality measurable and run evals, regression suites and review loops.
• Rebuild how the platform is built and operated, raising output per engineer through AI-assisted development, review, testing and operations.
• Shape team composition and resourcing: scope the roadmap, plan headcount, define roles and standards, and hire A-players; develop people against the bar.
• Own the architecture end-to-end, throughput, reliability, build-versus-buy, technical debt, secure-by-design architecture, responsible AI and the engineering and AI cost structure.
• Coach engineers on agentic best practices and show the executive team what is newly possible with new AI tooling.

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related technical field; an advanced degree is strongly preferred.
• 15+ years of progressive engineering leadership, including significant time as a CTO or VP of Engineering, or as a direct report to one, at meaningful scale.
• Deep, hands-on knowledge of modern AI engineering, with foundation models and agentic systems deployed at scale against real business processes.

Required skills

• Foundation models: building and fine-tuning from the ground up, harness design, retrieval, context engineering, evaluation.
• Agentic architectures and agentic engineering at scale.