CTO Office

About Ocean

Ocean is an email security company; we build AI systems that catch the attacks that slip past everyone else — phishing, social engineering, BEC, impersonation, AiTM/credential phishing, and AI-generated. We are a young, fast-growing cybersecurity startup building a strong team across Israel and the US. The company currently has around 35 employees and is expected to double in size over the next year.

About the CTO Office

The CTO Office is Ocean's exploration engine. We take the early-stage, high-leverage bets no other team has capacity for — and we own one mission above all: keeping Ocean an AI-native organization, across every department.

When there's a new technique worth testing, a workflow that should be agentic but isn't, or an idea too ambiguous for a roadmap — this is the team that picks it up. We prototype fast and kill ideas early.

Ocean is building AI-native email security for a world of increasingly sophisticated, AI-powered threats. The CTO Office plays a key role in making sure the company not only builds AI products, but also operates as an AI-native organization internally.

This role will work closely with the CTO / Co-Founder and senior stakeholders across the company to identify high-leverage opportunities, validate them quickly, and turn them into practical tools, workflows, and prototypes that create real adoption.

• We drive AI-native adoption across R&D, product, sales, and marketing — processes, tooling, and measurement
• We run PoCs on ideas too early to plan around
• We scan the outside world — research, competitors, open source — and turn the best signal into working prototypes

Responsibilities

What you will do

• Own missions end-to-end. From idea to shipped, adopted solution — design, build, demo, hand off.
• Build AI agents and AI-native workflows that accelerate teams across the whole company.
• Act as an internal consultant for innovation: Partner with R&D, product, and sales to identify and de-risk high-leverage opportunities before they enter the standard roadmap.
• Bring the outside in and represent the work. Track a fast-moving field, turn the best of it into prototypes, and present projects internally and at conferences.
• Prioritize opportunities based on business impact, technical feasibility, adoption potential, and speed of validation.
• Define lightweight success metrics for PoCs and prototypes — adoption, time saved, workflow quality, accuracy, usability, or business impact.
• Turn ambiguous internal needs into clear technical direction, practical prototypes, and repeatable workflows.
• Work closely with customer-facing teams to identify field insights, customer pain points, and market signals that can become valuable internal tools or product-adjacent prototypes.
• Help create the operating rhythm for AI-native experimentation: what to test, how to evaluate it, when to kill it, and when to scale it.

Requirements

Who you are

• A builder, not just an advisor. Analysis without artifacts isn't enough — you ship.
• You move without waiting to be told. Ambiguity in, clarity out — no playbook needed.
• You're a strong, production-grade engineer. Prototypes are scrappy by design, but your fundamentals are what make them hold up and hand off cleanly.
• You close loops. Documented, demoed, handed off — you leave systems better than you found them.
• You communicate clearly. Comfortable presenting to executives and non-technical teams — you write and speak without filler.
• You have strong product intuition. You do not just build what is requested — you understand the problem, challenge assumptions, and shape the right solution.
• You are comfortable working directly with senior leadership in a high-trust, high-autonomy environment.
• You care about adoption, not just demos. A prototype is only valuable if people actually use it or if it teaches the company something important.

What you will bring

• 6+ years of hands-on technical experience in security research, systems engineering, or a combination. Academic credentials matter less than what you've actually built and broken.
• Hands-on experience building AI agents / agentic workflows — a must
• Strong communication and presentation skills — comfortable in front of executives and non-technical audiences
• Fast learning in a field that changes every month — staying current (blogs, research, what shipped last week) is part of the job
• End-to-end ownership in a fast-moving startup environment
• Strong ability to translate ambiguous business, operational, or customer-facing problems into practical technical solutions.
• Experience building tools, automations, agents, or internal systems that were actually adopted by teams outside of engineering.
• Strong judgment around when to prototype quickly, when to invest in production quality, and when to stop pursuing an idea.

Nice to have

• Prior experience in a CTO Office, field CTO, or technical strategy function at a security company.
• Military-unit or equivalent cyber research background
• Experience in cybersecurity, email security, security operations, or AI-security products.
• Experience building internal AI tools or agentic workflows for GTM, product, research, operations, or executive teams.
• Experience working closely with founders, CTOs, or technical leadership on zero-to-one innovation initiatives.