Chief Technology Officer - remote job

Toptal is hiring a Chief Technology Officer - a lead role, which means responsibility for a team or a direction. The role sits in Other jobs and is fully remote. The company hires candidates based in Europe.

The employer did not publish a figure; that is settled at interview. The advert sets no condition on working hours.

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About Toptal

Toptal is a global network of top talent in business, design, and technology, enabling companies to scale their teams on-demand. With over $200 million in annual revenue and a workforce distributed worldwide, Toptal is the world's largest fully remote workforce.

At Toptal, we blend the best of virtual teams with a framework that fosters innovation, social interaction, and fun. We operate without borders, move at a rapid pace, and constantly break new ground.

Position Description

As the Chief Technology Officer, you will lead the product and engineering teams, prioritizing AI in all areas of our work. You will oversee Toptal’s technical architecture and build it with an AI-first approach, leveraging best practices for agentic engineering. AI is not a separate task within the engineering team but is integral to our core processes.

You will define and own the AI architecture and best practices used throughout the company. Additionally, you will manage initiatives that bring AI into production, ensuring foundational models are built and fine-tuned from the ground up. Your role involves creating and implementing best practices for agentic engineering that boost productivity without compromising quality. You will act as a builder and architect, solving complex problems and ensuring no task is too small. You will set the technical direction and facilitate regular meetings that turn strategic plans into actionable outcomes. You will be deeply involved in design reviews and code reviews, not just observing them.

You will be the technical leader for all of Toptal’s products. You will work closely with Product to design infrastructure that exposes core business logic through modular interfaces that the rest of the company can build upon. You will collaborate with a group of hands-on executives to directly shape Toptal’s growth, profitability, and operational excellence.

You will manage resourcing and workforce planning, defining roles, and setting hiring standards. This role involves scoping work, sizing teams, and planning headcount. We are not looking for someone who delegates these responsibilities to HR; hiring A-players is a top priority.

You will also lead the team, setting standards, developing people, and ensuring that every member meets these standards.

You will be a leading expert in AI, driving the adoption and innovation of AI across the company. You will coach engineers on agentic best practices, showcase the potential of new AI tools to the executive team, and integrate AI into all functions of Toptal.

This role demands high-energy execution and a keen eye for detail. You will bring urgency to every aspect and be measured by outcomes. This is a remote position, and all communications must be in English.

Responsibilities

The following information outlines the general nature and level of work performed. It is not an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities, or required skills.

1. AI and Agentic Engineering - Define and own Toptal’s AI technology strategy and the underlying architecture, including model selection, fine-tuning, harness design, orchestration, retrieval, context engineering, tool and MCP integration, guardrails, evaluation, and cost control. - Scale agentic engineering across all operations, including matching, vetting, onboarding, delivery, and internal operations. - Ensure AI quality is measurable, owning evals, regression suites, and review loops to prove quality. - Rebuild how the platform is built and operated, using AI to increase engineer output through assisted development, review, testing, and operations.

2. Team, Resourcing, and Accountability - Redefine team roles in an era where boundaries between product, engineering, and design are blurred. - Own resourcing and workforce planning, scope the roadmap, plan headcount, and hit time-sensitive hiring commitments. - Set and maintain high standards for the team, assess talent honestly, and develop people against these standards as the organization grows.

3. Platform and Execution - Own the architecture end-to-end, from services and data flows to interfaces and system boundaries, and ensure it remains coherent as it scales. - Own throughput, reliability, and the underlying platform layers, including AI-dependent paths where latency, drift, and provider outages can impact performance. Manage build-versus-buy decisions, technical debt, secure-by-design architecture, responsible AI, and the engineering and AI cost structure down to inference and token spend.

Onboarding Expectations

- In the first week, you will learn Toptal’s model and platform architecture and meet key leaders across Engineering, Product, Industries, and Services. - Establish a direct and productive working relationship with the CEO. - In the first month, you will assess the engineering function and AI maturity, identifying areas for improvement and presenting a strategy to the executive team. - In the first three months, you will implement your plan, present your resourcing strategy, and launch shared AI architecture and evals, with one agentic workflow in production. - In the first six months, you will demonstrate business impact from AI in core workflows, and ensure the team is delivering on plan. - In the first year, you will run an advanced engineering organization recognized industry-wide for its AI capabilities, with AI embedded in the architecture and operating model, not just as pilots.

Qualifications and Job Requirements

- A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field is required, and an advanced degree is strongly preferred. - At least 15 years of progressive engineering leadership, including significant time as a CTO or VP of Engineering, or as a direct report to one at scale. - Deep, current, hands-on expertise in modern AI engineering, including foundation models, agentic architectures, harness design, retrieval, context engineering, fine-tuning, and evaluation. You have shipped and operated these in production and know how to build and fine-tune foundation models from the ground up.