Chief Technology Officer

is an advanced maritime autonomy company engineering a decentralized, cross-domain cognitive ecosystem designed to secure, monitor, and protect the world’s oceans. Traditional maritime domain awareness and subsea infrastructure inspection rely on massive, crewed support vessels, heavy tethered hardware, and slow post-mission data analysis costing up to $50,000 per day.

We are disrupting this capital-intensive paradigm. By deploying optimized, multi-modal transformer neural networks natively onto low-power edge-compute hardware, our synchronized aerial, surface, and subsea autonomous craft execute real-time sensor fusion and adaptive mission pathing in communication-denied maritime environments.

Guided by our centralized software layer, HOT Command , and powered by our predictive data engine, HOT Sentinel , this dual-use technology stack replaces resource-intensive crewed vessels with an “Autonomy-as-a-Service” model to deliver instantaneous, on-vessel anomaly detection for defense, critical infrastructure protection, search and rescue, and environmental monitoring operations.

The Opportunity Led by a veteran defense business development executive and former Special Forces leader (Duke MBA), Harris Oceanic Technologies is finalizing corporate positioning to unlock non-dilutive federal R&D funding pipelines.

We are seeking an elite, technically ruthless Technical Co-Founder & CTO to take full ownership of our software, robotics, and machine learning architecture.

This is a pre-funding, equity-heavy co-founder role transitioning into a highly competitive executive salary and benefits package immediately upon the closure of our pending federal funding or pre-seed institutional venture capital rounds.

Your immediate objective will be collaborating directly with the CEO to validate our high-fidelity digital twin simulation environment.

Core Responsibilities: Lead R&D Core Architecture: Take complete ownership of designing, building, and benchmarking our high-fidelity digital twin simulation environment using ROS 2, Gazebo, or similar advanced robotics frameworks.Edge-AI Optimization: Develop and implement the neural network quantization and pruning pipelines required to execute real-time multi-modal sensor fusion (LiDAR, sonar, radar, vision) on low-power, constrained edge-compute hardware.

Mesh Networks & Communication: Formulate decentralized, low-bandwidth communication protocols that allow asymmetric multi-agent surface and subsea vessels to synchronize spatial maps over severely degraded acoustic networks.

Technical Executive Leadership: Direct the technical writing sections, work plans, and performance milestones for upcoming federal grants (NSF SBIR/STTR Phase I) and institutional investor presentations.

Ideal Candidate Profile:Technical Depth: M.S. or Ph.D. in Robotics, Computer Science, Aerospace/Naval Engineering, or equivalent deep industry experience building autonomous vehicles or edge-computed AI pipelines.The Tooling Stack: Deep proficiency in C++, Python, ROS 2, and embedded Linux, alongside familiarity with machine learning toolchains (PyTorch, TensorRT, ONNX Runtime).Startup Mindset: Comfortable moving at a high velocity, handling early-stage execution complexity, and building foundational codebase systems from scratch pre-funding.

Preferred Qualifications: Prior experience with maritime robotics (AUVs/USVs), dual-use defense tech engineering, or writing successful technical grant work plans.Compensation & Structure:Generous Co-Founder Equity Allocation (Structured with standard 4-year vesting and a 1-year cliff to protect corporate intellectual property).T

Pulled from the full job description

• Professional development assistance
• Tuition reimbursement
• Parental leave
• 401(k)
• Health insurance
• Retirement plan
• Paid time off, * 401(k)
• Dental insurance
• Employee assistance program
• Flexible schedule
• Flexible spending account
• Health insurance
• Health savings account
• Life insurance
• Paid time off
• Parental leave
• Professional development assistance
• Relocation assistance
• Retirement plan
• Tuition reimbursement
• Vision insurance