About This Project

This project is for a new enterprise AI platform being built by a well-capitalized APAC technology group with three decades of operational experience serving Fortune 500 customers across financial services, aviation, public sector, and commercial enterprise. We are building the next-generation AI execution platform for enterprise customer operations - architected from first principles on infrastructure that matured past the monolithic era of 2023.

The platform enables enterprises to automate end-to-end customer workflows - dispute resolution, regulated enquiry handling, multilingual operations, complex booking with production-grade auditability, deterministic execution, and regulated-industry compliance posture. Our customers are the organizations whose internal compliance teams read every line of architecture before deployment. The platform is designed for them.

The role

We are seeking a Chief Technology Officer to own the architecture, engineering organization, and technical execution of the Project platform. The CTO partners with multiple work-streams internally, and serves as the senior technical voice in customer, partner, and advisor conversations.

This is a hands-on architectural role. The CTO is expected to personally lead the foundational platform decisions, recruit the engineering organization, and ship the first production deployment within the first six months. As the organization scales, the CTO builds and directs a multi-disciplinary engineering group across onshore and outsourced engineering pods.

What you will do

Own the architectural direction of the Project's platform: workflow orchestration, policy engines, retrieval systems, LLM routing, voice runtime, connector fabric, evaluation harness, audit and replay.
Personally architect and code the foundational platform components in the first 90 days. This is not a role for a CTO who has stopped coding.
Recruit, hire, and lead the engineering organization, plus a dedicated SRE function.
Own the production launch roadmap: first enterprise pilot live within 6 months, voice-channel general availability within 12 months, regulated-enterprise edition within 18 months.
Lead the compliance and security engineering program: SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, HIPAA readiness, PCI-DSS readiness, Monetary Authority of Singapore Technology Risk Management guidelines, Singapore government IM8 alignment.
Serve as the senior technical voice in customer deep-dives, partner negotiations (cloud providers, model providers, voice infrastructure), and advisor conversations.
Maintain the architectural discipline of modularity and swappable components. The platform is opinionated. We buy commodity primitives and build the differentiating layers. The CTO protects this discipline when execution pressure would erode it.

What you bring

Hard requirements (candidates must demonstrate all of the following):

10 or more years of production software engineering experience, with four or more in senior architectural roles (Principal, Staff+, Senior Staff, Distinguished Engineer, or prior CTO / VP Engineering at a venture-backed company).
Personally shipped production systems built on durable workflow orchestration engines at scale - Temporal, Cadence, Apache Airflow, AWS Step Functions, or equivalent; not proof-of-concept or prototype work.
Direct production experience integrating large language models into enterprise systems: structured outputs, function calling, evaluation harnesses, model routing, applied prompt engineering at production scale. Applied ML-systems engineering, not research-track ML.
Has built or owned a substantial subsystem - retrieval, policy evaluation, orchestration, observability in a regulated industry: financial services, healthcare, aviation, government, telecommunications, or equivalent.
Has hired and led an engineering organization of 10 or more, including across time zones or onshore/offshore splits.
Expect a high bar for architectural judgment, technical writing, and cross-functional collaboration with product, commercial, and executive leadership.
Can write production code on the first day of the role. Demonstrable recent contributions to codebases, architectural documentation, or open-source projects required.

Strongly preferred (clear advantage but not strictly required):

Production experience with voice AI systems - speech-to-text, text-to-speech, voice activity detection, turn-taking, sub-second latency budgets.
Direct work on policy engines or fine-grained access control at enterprise scale - Open Policy Agent, Casbin, AWS Cedar, bespoke authorization systems, or equivalent.
Experience taking a software platform through SOC 2 Type II or ISO 27001 audit from a technical leadership perspective.
Previous CTO, VP Engineering, or Founding Engineer role at a Series A or Series B technology company with a positive outcome (acquisition, public listing, or continued institutional investment).
Working context in APAC enterprise markets - Singapore, Jakarta, Manila, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul, or equivalent regional enterprise sales and delivery experience.
Track record of technical thought leadership - published architecture writeups, conference talks, maintained open-source projects, or similar public presence.

What we offer

Access to a technical environment with meaningful customer urgency: enterprise operations workflows from day one, regulated-industry design partners, and partnerships with leading model, cloud, and voice infrastructure providers.
Opportunity to shape a category-defining platform in a rapidly evolving space, with the backing of an operationally deep parent organization and seasoned executive leadership.
Travel: Approximately 25% travel to North America, Europe, and other APAC markets for customer engagements, partner meetings, and recruiting activities.
Team environment: Small founding team scaling rapidly.

How to apply

Apply through LinkedIn with your current CV and a brief note describing one production system you personally architected, the key trade-offs you made, and what you would change about that architecture today. Applications are reviewed by the executive team directly.

Shortlisted candidates will be invited to a multi-round process including a technical architecture discussion, a live architectural exercise, and executive alignment conversations. References and backchannel checks form part of the final stage. The end-to-end process typically takes 4-6 weeks.

TDCX

Latest Jobs

Chief Technology Officer