CTO (Early-Stage Deep Tech Startup)

Our client is a recently funded, venture-backed deep-tech startup tackling one of the most pressing infrastructure challenges of our time: the escalating cost of large-scale data search. They are building a performance-enhancing plugin for widely adopted enterprise search platforms, with deep integration into Lucene-based search stacks. Their technology significantly improves query execution and resource efficiency, often reducing infrastructure requirements by 25–50% for large-scale search workloads.

The result: higher throughput, lower cloud spend, improved scalability, and meaningfully reduced data center energy consumption.

With early commercial traction among enterprise customers and strong backing from experienced investors, the company is now entering a critical growth phase.

This is the company’s first senior technical leadership hire.

As CTO, you will own the full technical agenda, from architecture and engineering leadership to shaping the product and contributing to the company’s overall strategy. You will work closely with the founding team while remaining involved in shaping the core system.

This is a high-ownership role in an early-stage environment, focused on solving hard problems across query execution, indexing, compression, memory management, and I/O performance at scale.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and grow the engineering team, mentoring early talent and shaping a strong technical culture
• Define and own the architectural vision and technical roadmap
• Drive development of core systems, including query execution pipelines, indexing, compression, and memory efficiency
• Establish engineering best practices across performance, reliability, and deployment (DevOps, SLOs, observability)
• Provide technical leadership on the most critical parts of the system, particularly where performance and correctness are essential
• Engage with enterprise customers across the full lifecycle — from pre-sales and onboarding through to expansion — translating technical capabilities into tangible value
• Monitor the evolving landscape in search, databases, and infrastructure

This role is designed for a technical leader who enjoys combining technical depth with leadership and customer-facing impact.

You might come from a senior or principal engineering background and be ready to step into a broader leadership role — or you may already have experience as a CTO or founder and are excited to return to a deeply hands-on position in an early-stage company.

In either case, you:

• Enjoy working close to the metal on hard performance problems
• Want real ownership over architecture and technical direction
• Are motivated by building both systems and teams from an early stage

What We’re Looking For

• Proven experience in a senior engineering or technical leadership role, with startup or scale-up exposure as a plus
• Strong foundation in system design, performance, and scalability — able to engage confidently at a deep technical level
• Hands-on experience with performance-critical systems, ideally including C++ and JVM-based environments
• Comfortable working with Linux, profiling tools, and production systems where performance is non-negotiable
• Track record of shipping software to enterprise customers
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to work across technical and non-technical stakeholders

Nice to Have

• Experience with Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, or Apache Lucene internals
• Background in information retrieval, storage engines, compression, or high-performance computing
• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, or similar

• An opportunity to take on a foundational CTO role in a recently funded, highly ambitious company
• A genuinely hard technical problem at the intersection of algorithms, systems, and infrastructure with clear value for enterprise customers
• Opportunity to define technical direction, build a team, and shape engineering culture from an early stage
• Meaningful long-term upside through an option program
• Early traction with enterprise customers and strong investor backing
• Gothenburg-based, with a hybrid setup and close collaboration with the founding team

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