Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Read the overview on our job board page before you apply: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/theacademysf

We're looking for a CTO to be the key technical mentor to our students - and to build and manage our software systems. This role is part professor, part software leader.

Key Technical Mentor & Educator

What does a modern student need to learn about software, in order to be successful in the future? Hardware? AI? You’ll be heavily involved in shaping the most technical aspects of HAA’s curriculum. The greatest minds in software will come and speak at the Academy - you may interview them or work with them on their course design. Students will also come to you for advice / office hours.

You have to LOVE tinkering (hardware + software), and be someone who the students will look up to and admire. Ideally you've founded a few companies. Maybe you've written books or given lots of talks. Maybe you're just someone who has a huge list of engineers who have loved learning from you.

You'll buy 3D Printers, Robotic Arms, play with NVIDIA chips, build LLMs from scratch. You'll build a sick robotics, hardware, and software lab through donations and a budget of ~$1M to just buy cool stuff the students can use.

You'll also have access to our Founding Partners and any credits / technology they share - Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, and Stripe.

Software Leader

You’ll also get to build software that helps HAA scale. Initially, this might look like student-facing software projects - like coding challenges for applicants, or a hackathon leaderboard. Down the line, this might include an AI-native Learning Management System and potentially a version of YC Bookface that allows us to manage the projects and creations of hundreds of students.

The roadmap isn’t defined yet - and I cannot fathom all of the ideas we'll have - but I feel it will be quite broad and fun to work on, given the audience and the context.

Yes, we've reserved a solid equity chunk for the right person. If that's you, find a way to us. The application form for this role is essentially useless.