Member of the Technical Staff - CTO Office
About the Position
A principal-level hands-on engineer and former CTO or founder responsible for driving 0-to-1 innovation initiatives that unlock Alice's next wave of revenue. Embedded directly within a dedicated product pod, this role combines deep architectural execution with client-facing authority to convert frontier technical capabilities into market-defining products.
Roles & Responsibilities
- 0-to-1 Technical Ownership: Architect, code, and launch greenfield "needle mover" products from scratch through to the first paying design partners. Prepare tailored demos and POC to potential clients to help close the deals.
- Technical Client Leadership: Lead the Tier 2 high-stakes technical deep dives and whiteboarding sessions with elite engineering teams (e.g., Anthropic Integration with Taiga, Google Play integration with Kryptos), handling complex technical objections on the spot without escalation.
- Product Strategy Alignment: Partner closely with the Pod Manager (Nimrod/Alon) and Pod product lead (eg. Dadi) to shape the technical roadmap, validating architecture against early adopter needs and refining integration specs. Introduce and identify existing initiatives for significant automation that can help reduce cost and time to market (that might come organically from the delivery teams as well)
- Targeted Pod Execution: Maintain high-velocity hands-on output while reserving bandwidth to jump in ad-hoc to help the pod team resolve critical bottlenecks or hit major crunch-time deadlines.
Requirements
- Experience: At least 8 years of experience as a Former CTO/ Technical Co-Founder, or Principal/Staff Engineer with a history of shipping complex software systems from scratch.
- Technical Expertise: Elite hands-on coding and system design skills, with strong exposure to modern AI paradigms (e.g., agentic workflows, red-teaming, or trust & safety infrastructure).
- Product Instinct: Strong commercial intuition-able to bridge technical possibilities with revenue potential and customer pain points.
- Client Presence: Exceptional communication skills with the authority to sit eye-to-eye with external technical executives, principal engineers, and lab leaders.
- Mindset: Pragmatic, low-ego, highly autonomous operator who thrives in fast-paced 0-to-1 building environments without needing heavy organizational scaffolding.
About Alice
THE CHALLENGES ALONG THE WAY
1. Being Both Strategist and Executioner
One of the hardest parts of this role is that you’re both the visionary and the builder; the one drawing the map and paving the road.
That means switching between high-level strategy and hands-on experimentation daily, and doing it while bringing others along with you. There’s no playbook for this kind of work. You’re paving an unpaved road, one small experiment at a time.
2. Balancing Security and Innovation
ActiveFence is the leading provider of security and safety solutions for online experiences, safeguarding more than 3 billion users, top foundation models, and the world’s largest enterprises and tech platforms every day.
As a trusted ally to major technology firms and Fortune 500 brands that build user-generated and GenAI products, ActiveFence empowers security, AI, and policy teams with low-latency Real-Time Guardrails and a continuous Red Teaming program that pressure-tests systems with adversarial prompts and emerging threat techniques. Powered by deep threat intelligence, unmatched harmful-content detection, and coverage of 117+ languages, ActiveFence enables organizations to deliver engaging and trustworthy experiences at global scale while operating safely and responsibly across all threat landscapes.