Chief Technology & Product Officer (CTPO) in B2B SaaS AI Startup - Permanent or Interim

We're open to either a long-term hire or an experienced interim leader who can come in, set direction, build structure, and either stay for the long run or set up a successor for success. If you're an interim executive with a track record of scaling engineering and product organizations in similar contexts, we want to talk. The Opportunity This is a rare role. You're joining a company that has strong commercial momentum and a differentiated AI platform - but needs a decisive leader to connect engineering and product, drive execution discipline, and build the organization needed to scale. You will partner with the CEO, who is responsible for commercial growth and overall company direction, and collaborate with our Chief Innovation Officer, who leads AI strategy and R&D. You will own the technology and product function end-to-end, with full authority over roadmap, delivery, architecture, and team. This is not a role for someone who wants to spend the first six months auditing things. You'll be expected to come in, assess quickly, take ownership, and lead. The team is capable and motivated. Someone who can set direction and hold the bar. If you've done this before, built engineering and product organizations through a growth phase, this is the role for you. Your tasks Product & Roadmap

• Own the 9-12 month product roadmap, with milestones explicitly tied to scaling
• Establish clear product KPIs, create a data-driven foundation for prioritization
• Bring structure to product management: clear ownership between AI/R&D, Tech and PM function
• Partner with the Chief Innovation Officer (AI/R&D), who focuses on exploration and long-term AI strategy, while you own what gets built, shipped, and scaled
• Bring structure to product management and define clear ownership across product and engineering
• Make hard calls on what to build and what to cut

Engineering Leadership

• Take over and strengthen the engineering organization, currently 6 engineers with clear growth ambitions
• Drive or set up key hires: VP Engineering, Staff/Principal Engineers (Backend), Senior LLMOps Engineer
• Introduce engineering discipline: estimation, mandatory reviews, standardized AI-assisted development workflows

Architecture & AI

• Drive the transition to production-grade AI architecture
• Standardize how AI systems are built, deployed, and monitored across all generations of our stack
• Own the delivery of Gen 3 (agentic LLM system)

Organizational & Cultural

• Establish clear decision-making authority at the leadership level
• Build a high-trust, high-accountability engineering culture that outlasts your tenure
• Work closely with the founding team: provide clear escalation paths, define role boundaries, resolve conflicts
• Extend, standardize, and ensure adoption of an AI-first operating model across the company to drive productivity, speed, and decision quality, * Meaningful equity stake: we want you to be an owner, not just an employee. This will be a real number worth having.
• Competitive senior leadership compensation
• Direct influence on company strategy
• A product that genuinely works and a market that's ready for it
• A founding team that is coachable, commercially strong, and committed to getting this right
• A team that values real collaboration: we're ~25 people, we work in person, and we invest in the team beyond the day-to-day (regular team events - the kind of culture where people actually know each other)

Our Stack (for reference)

• Cloud: GCP - Managed Kubernetes (GKE), CloudSQL PostgreSQL
• Backend: TypeScript and Python services
• Frontend: React SPA (TypeScript)
• AI: Multi-generation stack (BERT * RAG * Agentic LLM); Gemini via Vertex AI (EU), OpenAI API
• AI Evaluation: MLflow + proprietary annotation tooling
• Vector DBs: pgvector (customer data), Pinecone (regulatory data)
• Security: ISO 27001 certified (via Kertos)

• You've led engineering and/or product organizations as a CTO, CPO, CTPO, or VP-level equivalent - either as a permanent leader or in interim/fractional roles - in a high-growth startup context
• You have hands-on experience building and shipping production-grade ML or AI systems
• You're a decisive leader. You don't avoid difficult conversations, you don't wait for consensus on everything, and you can navigate a strong-willed founding team constructively
• You've successfully scaled a team through a growth phase, hiring, structuring, and developing engineers beyond the early-stage scrappiness

What will set you apart:

• Experience in enterprise SaaS, compliance, or regulated industries. You understand what "enterprise-grade" actually means in practice
• Familiarity with our tech stack: GCP/Kubernetes, Python backend, TypeScript/React frontend, PostgreSQL, LLM tooling (LiteLLM, LangGraph, PydanticAI or similar)
• Experience with AI operations at scale: LLMOps, model lifecycle management, evaluation frameworks, production AI reliability

Mindset:

• You care about quality and simplicity: You'd rather have three things done right than ten things halfway
• You're a builder, not just a strategist: You're comfortable getting into the weeds when needed
• You understand that organizational health and technical health are the same problem
• You're motivated by creating something that lasts: A team, a codebase, and a product you're proud of

Who We Are traide AI is building the intelligence layer for global trade compliance - and it's working. We serve over 250 enterprise customers across Europe, have grown ARR 4x year-over-year, and are profitable. We operate across regulated enterprise environments, and have built a proprietary AI platform that goes well beyond off-the-shelf LLM wrappers. We're not a typical early-stage startup anymore. We're past product-market fit, we have real revenue, and we're in the phase that matters most: scaling. The market opportunity is significant, the product works, and the team is capable. What we need now is someone who can lead us through the next chapter - structurally, technically, and as a product organization. Permanent or Interim: both work for us, We value diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. If you're passionate about making a difference and eager to learn, we'd love to hear from you - even if you don't meet every requirement. And one more thing: We're not just building an AI product, we're building an AI company. From how we think about processes to how we grow teams and shape our culture - AI is at the core of how we operate. Application process: You will receive feedback within two weeks. The process includes interviews, a practical challenge, and conversations with our team.