Technical Co-founder (CTO) - AI for Automotive Retail

Every used-car dealer’s profit is made or lost the moment they buy the car - not when they sell it. That decision runs on gut feel, spreadsheets, and whoever has a spare hour, inside a $500B+ industry that hasn’t meaningfully modernized how it buys. We think that’s an AI-native category waiting to be built, and we’re going first.

The problem and solution are validated with a domain co-founder who lives this daily and has already hand

The Venture

Atrium is an always-on AI workforce, not a dashboard - agents that watch, learn, and earn the right to act on their own, deployed inside dealer groups’ existing workflows. The same decision logic has to show up everywhere the work already happens - web, desktop, our own browser, mobile - so the workforce follows the person, not the other way around. One brain, every surface.

This isn’t a weekend’s worth of CRUD. Think dozens of specialist agents organized into a handful of coordinated workflows, sharing one memory, each one earning the right to act on its own track record - across four surfaces at once. If that sounds like a fun problem rather than a scary one, keep reading.

A real technical moat if built right, and a wide-open field - no dominant AI-native player has claimed this category yet. Specifics on the product, the model, and where we stand commercially are best shared in conversation; we’re early and staying deliberately quiet in the market., This is a co-founder role, not a CTO hire. In return for that level of commitment, you receive founder-level equity, founder-level authority with co-decision rights on product, technology, hiring, fundraising, and strategy, and a genuine partnership with the CEO on every material decision., As Co-Founder & CTO, you will take over the production code and continue building the product (the first lines of production code), set the technical direction, and lead execution end-to-end.

• Own the core architecture decision that shapes everything else - how the agents actually see and act in a dealer’s world, and how one system stays coherent across a web app, a desktop app, our own browser, and mobile, without four separate products drifting apart
• Design the autonomy model: how an agent earns the right to act alone, and how that trust is never assumed
• Build the integration layer into a data ecosystem that won’t always cooperate
• Build partnerships with ecosystem data providers and third-party systems to land unconventional integrations no standard API gets you
• Own unit economics as an architecture problem, not an afterthought - this many agents, across this many surfaces, has to add up
• Own the design and layering of the system for the dev team, and keep the build matched to what the business and sales side actually need
• Be the technical voice with dealers, design partners, and investors
• Hire and lead the founding engineering team

• Has shipped agentic or LLM systems into production where being wrong actually costs something
• Has shipped desktop and mobile apps connected to a larger web platform - comfortable with one product living across multiple facets and surfaces, not just a single app
• Has shipped LLM-based products, but also worked with SLMs and SLM fine-tuning
• Has dealt with the real nuances of web scraping - anti-bot defences, rate limits, brittle DOMs, the gap between “works in a demo” and “works at scale against a site that doesn’t want you there”
• Has built complex, modelled data graph layers for intelligence - not just a data pipeline, but a structure that reasoning can actually run on
• Comfortable owning infra, data, and product alone - then hiring past yourself
• Treats guardrails and reversibility as core product, not overhead
• Good to have: edge computing and power-constrained systems, high-frequency distributed computing infrastructure

Great to Have:

• Experience building against locked-down or adversarial third-party data
• Vertical/operational domain grit (Automotive)
• Pragmatic and creative - a solution finder who gets to “working” fast and iterates from there
• Co-operative, strategic, and hands-on in equal measure