Open Role
Unified Sciences - CTO Founding Engineer
We're built an AI that does science. Not summarizes papers. Not generates text. Actually reasons about hypotheses, designs experiments, executes them in sandboxed environments, and produces results. We matched Meta's fine-tuned medical model on hypothesis generation with zero training data and zero domain-specific retraining. We're a pre-seed company backed by Mila-caliber research. Now we need someone who can co-own the technical vision and scale the architecture from "impressive prototype" to "infrastructure that runs autonomous scientific experiments at scale."
What You'll Own
Architecture & systems — The codebase is a working 5-stage pipeline (literature review → hypothesis → experiment design → sandboxed execution → analysis). You'll decide how it evolves: what gets rewritten, what gets scaled, what gets thrown away. Infrastructure — Move from single-machine execution to distributed experiment orchestration. GPU clusters, experiment queues, result pipelines. We have $1M/yr compute budget — you decide how to spend it. Agentic coding system — The engine reasons about scientific relationships. You'll work with the Chief Scientist to extend it — new reasoning patterns, new domains, deeper cross-domain generalization. This engine generates and runs code autonomously. The agentic coder is the highest-leverage piece of the stack. Making it reliable, safe, and fast is a first-order problem. Hiring — You'll help hire the next 3-5 engineers. Your technical bar sets the team's ceiling.
What This Isn't
This isn't a VP of Engineering role where you manage engineers and attend meetings. You'll write code every day for at least the first year. This isn't a job where you optimize an existing system. You'll make foundational decisions about how the system works. This isn't comfortable. Pre-seed, small team, high stakes, big problem.
What We're Looking For
- You've built and shipped production systems — not just prototyped. You've made something work at scale that wasn't supposed to work.
- researcher or a pure backend engineer — we need someone who lives at the intersection.
- You can go deep on ML infrastructure AND write a solid distributed system. We don't need a pure ML
- You have strong opinions about code quality, loosely held. The codebase is ~80K lines built by one person. Parts are elegant, parts need love. You can look at it and immediately see what matters and what doesn't.
- You're comfortable with ambiguity. We're building something that doesn't have a playbook. The right architecture for autonomous scientific discovery hasn't been figured out yet — that's the job.
- Published research is a plus, not a requirement.
- Mila/CIFAR/NeurIPS/ICLR network is a strong plus.
Compensation
- Significant founding equity (vesting)
- Competitive Base Salary
- $1M/yr compute budget you control
- Work directly with a CIFAR AI Chair on novel research
Apply
Send a short note explaining why this venture, and link your LinkedIn or résumé.