Co-Founder & CTO
Software Engineering · Full-time
Posted on Sep 28, 2026
About the 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.