Co-Founder & CTO
- Location
- San Francisco
- Workplace
- On-site
- Employment
- Full-time
- Compensation
- Equity
About this role
General Creative is seeking an exceptional technical co-founder and CTO to own research strategy, product development, and team building. You'll join as an equal founder with ~28% equity, working full-time to build a proprietary training and evaluation platform for creative AI on top of a live product already generating valuable data. This is a rare opportunity to shape technical vision and company direction from the ground up, not a conventional CTO hire.
What You'll Do
- Own technical and research strategy, from current workflows to a proprietary training and evaluation platform for creative agents.
- Build data infrastructure connecting briefs, submissions, generation traces, decisions, critique, and campaign outcomes.
- Design systems that evaluate, rank, critique, generate, and improve creative work.
- Develop the allocation policy that directs campaign budget (and simultaneously shapes dataset collection).
- Make core decisions on frontier models, fine-tuning, post-training, RL, and original research directions.
- Build reliable infrastructure for creator workflows, brand campaigns, experimentation, training, and inference.
- Set standards for data quality, consent, privacy, measurement, and model evaluation.
- Recruit and lead the first engineering and research team.
- Work directly with creators, brands, and investors.
What We're Looking For
- Hands-on experience building preference or reward models (RLHF, reward modeling, ranking subjective outputs, evaluation systems).
- Comfort with causal inference on observational data: selection bias, off-policy evaluation, adaptive experimentation, or validating proxies against delayed outcomes.
- Shipped real products used by people; research alone is not sufficient.
- Ready to commit full-time (6–7 days per week) as an equal co-founder with early-stage uncertainty.
- Experience at a frontier AI lab or research organization of similar caliber is a strong signal.
- Production ML at scale: bandits, sequential allocation, online experimentation, or ads/marketplace/recommender systems tied to business outcomes.
- Multimodal generation, agents, planning systems, or latent-variable modeling experience valued.
- Track record recruiting strong technical talent and owning programs end-to-end.
- High agency, intellectual honesty, low ego, and genuine interest in creativity and human feedback.
Compensation & Benefits
- Equity: ~28% as equal co-founder
- Cash compensation: Discussed directly based on circumstances and fit
- Location: In-person, San Francisco
Location
In-person, San Francisco.
What happens next
Skip the application pile. Clera gets you in front of the people who decide.
Confirm the fit
A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.
Clera pitches you to the company
Clera writes the intro, sends it to the founder, and handles the back-and-forth.
A meeting lands on your calendar
When the company wants to meet, Clera gets the call on your calendar. You just show up.
Culture & values
High agency and a strong bias toward building
Intellectual honesty and low ego
Comfortable changing direction when the evidence changes
Willing to do unglamorous early-stage work
Product instincts alongside technical depth
Real interest in creativity and human feedback
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