The Opportunity
SymphonIQ is a governed multi-agent AI platform for high-stakes regulated industries, purpose-built for Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) with a confirmed second vertical in energy and industrial. We are not a thin wrapper on a foundation model. We have built the cognitive architecture for environments where hallucination is not a UX issue, it is a contract dispute, a safety incident, or a compliance failure.
The platform is in production. Our flagship contract-intelligence agent runs daily inside our anchor customer, a Fortune-tier infrastructure contractor and recognized leader in heavy civil construction, on live pursuits at the multi-hundred-million-dollar scale. The platform's governance layer recently passed an independent adversarial audit with zero governance failures.
We are now in a focused production rebuild on a modern multi-agent stack, supported by a partially AWS-funded engagement with our build partner. Multiple patent applications are in prosecution with top-tier IP counsel. The seed round is in market, with significant capital already committed by an investor syndicate anchored by senior leadership at our flagship customer.
The CTO walks into momentum, not a blank page.
Why This Role Exists
SymphonIQ is a single-founder company today. Jared Smith built the cognitive architecture, designed the governance layer, and authored the patent specifications now in prosecution. He runs investor relations, customer success, and corporate strategy. The platform is far enough along that single-founder concentration is now the primary structural risk to the company. This hire reduces that risk.
The next CTO owns the production platform end to end. You partner with the engineering team driving the production rebuild, harden the system for broader rollout at our anchor customer and second pilot, and lead the technical conversations with cloud partners, prospective acquirers, and the seed syndicate. You are not inheriting technical debt blindly. The architectural path forward is established and the prior codebase is being retired.
What You Would Lead
The production platform.
You own the runtime, the deployment pipeline, and the operational rigor that turns alpha workloads into a platform our enterprise customers can scale on. Multiple agents are live or close to live. You define what "production-ready" means for this category and you hold the line.
The defensible IP layer.
Our governance and orchestration architecture is the patent-defensible core of the company. You will steward it through patent prosecution, an independent third-party security evaluation, and the technical conversations that flow from those validations. You will be a primary voice in deciding what we disclose, when, and to whom.
The cognitive architecture.
Our domain-encoded cognitive layer is the moat. You will lead how it evolves, how it expands into the second vertical, and how it integrates into customer environments without compromising governance or compounding maintenance cost.
Engineering team and partner orchestration.
The current build runs through an external engineering partner. As we close the seed and grow, you build out the in-house engineering organization, decide what stays with partners, and own the hiring bar.
Where the Company Stands Today
Production-deployed governance architecture. A multi-stage policy enforcement and oversight layer is live, with millisecond pre-generation enforcement, asynchronous post-generation review, and immutable audit logging.
Domain-encoded cognitive layer. A substantial library of governed cognitive modules across the AEC pursuit and execution lifecycle, with documented cross-module integration contracts.
Typed memory substrate. A governed memory layer with provenance traceability and decay-aware retrieval, running on a cloud-native AWS stack.
Patent prosecution underway. Multiple applications in active prosecution with top-tier IP counsel, covering the governance and orchestration architecture.
Anchor customer in production. A Fortune-tier infrastructure contractor with significant capital committed and a senior estimating executive as a daily user across multi-hundred-million-dollar live pursuits.
Second pilot engaged. A Fortune 500 specialty contractor (subsidiary of a publicly traded infrastructure services group) with a senior operations executive engaged as paying customer, advisor, and prospective forward-deployed lead.
Independent adversarial validation. The governance layer has passed an external adversarial audit with zero governance failures. A formal third-party security evaluation is currently underway.
Cloud-native AWS infrastructure. Container-orchestrated runtime with active partnership engagement with AWS, including partner program funding and ongoing strategic dialogue.
Who We Are Looking For
This is a builder's role. The right candidate has shipped production AI systems, has lived inside the operational reality of a multi-agent architecture, and can credibly own a patent-defensible governance layer in front of customers, regulators, and acquirers.
Required.
Ten or more years of software engineering leadership, with at least three in a CTO, VP Engineering, or principal engineer role at a venture-funded company that shipped production systems to enterprise customers.
Deep, current experience building on a major LLM stack and modern multi-agent orchestration frameworks. You can talk credibly about agent coordination, tool use, memory, and runtime governance without us teaching you the categories.
Production experience with governance, policy enforcement, or compliance-grade controls in AI or data systems. You understand the difference between pre-processing enforcement, inline evaluation, and post-generation auditing, and you have built or operated systems where the difference mattered.
AWS-native architecture experience at scale. Container orchestration, NoSQL and graph stores, vector search, serverless compute, and infrastructure-as-code.
Demonstrated ability to work alongside outside counsel on patent prosecution and defensibility. You understand what claim language is, what reduction to practice means, and why disclosure timing matters in a partnership conversation.
Direct experience hiring and managing engineering teams, including the judgment to decide what to build in-house, what to outsource, and what to retire.
Strongly preferred.
Domain familiarity with regulated enterprise verticals. AEC, energy, infrastructure, financial services, or healthcare.
Prior experience as a technical principal in an acquisition or strategic-investment process with a hyperscaler or large enterprise software vendor.
Background in evaluation frameworks, adversarial testing, or AI red-teaming.
Public technical voice. Talks, papers, OSS contributions, or other artifacts that establish credibility in the multi-agent or AI governance space.
How you work.
Direct, candid, and grounded. You give the founder a real answer, not a hedged one. You can disagree with the CEO in writing on a Tuesday and execute alongside him on a Wednesday.
You operate in production reality. You know the difference between a demo and a system, and you make calls that earn customer trust over time.
You hold technical conviction without ego. The platform has canon. You will challenge it where it is wrong and defend it where it is right.
Compensation and Structure
Title and seat. Chief Technology Officer, reporting to the CEO. Seat on the technical leadership team and material voice in board-level technical discussions.
Equity. Meaningful founding-team-tier equity grant, sized to reflect the stage and the role's centrality. Specifics negotiated against candidate profile and cash compensation election.
Cash. Market-competitive base, calibrated to seed-stage venture norms and the candidate's prior compensation. Adjustment built into the seed close.
Location. Headquartered in Littleton, Colorado. Colorado residency required. Regular in-person collaboration in the Denver metro area, with periodic travel to enterprise customer sites. Candidates outside the state of Colorado will not be prioritized at this time.
Start. As soon as right. We are not optimizing for speed of close. We are optimizing for the right partner.
About SymphonIQ
SymphonIQ, Inc. is a Delaware C-Corporation headquartered in Littleton, Colorado. We solve what we call the Shadow AI Crisis: the gap between what enterprises need from AI productivity and what they can deploy without compliance exposure. The platform addresses that gap by making governance the architecture, not a post-processing afterthought.
Our product suite spans the full AEC project pursuit and execution lifecycle. The combination of governed multi-agent runtime and a domain-encoded cognitive layer is the defensible moat. Hyperscaler announcements have commoditized the agent harness. Governed, vertical-specific cognition has not.
If you read this and the architecture genuinely interests you, that is the signal we are looking for.
How to Apply
Send a note to Jared Smith directly. Include a short writeup (a paragraph or two is fine) on the most interesting governance or multi-agent system problem you have shipped, and what you learned from it that you would carry into this role. Include relevant artifacts (papers, talks, code, prior systems) where they exist. We will respond personally to every serious inquiry.
