The role

The Field CTO is the Head of Engineering for the Media & Entertainment vertical. You will sit with CTOs and CIOs at Agency Holding Companies, Gaming Studios, and leading Generative AI model companies to help shape their roadmap and move them all to becoming AI-Native Tech Platforms. You will collaborate with our Engineering and Product teams to build the M&E primitives that make that transition possible. You will be the strategic technical owner of the Media & Entertainment vertical and the bridge between the physics of our AI infrastructure and inference ecosystem and the goals of our customers.

The role Is not
A Sales Engineer role running demos or answering RFPs, nor a Professional Services function delivering one-off implementations. It is also not a marketing or ceremonial evangelist position. The Field CTO is accountable for defining the technical posture of the Media & Entertainment vertical and driving product direction and revenue impact through real, scalable engineering outcomes.

You are welcome to work remotely from the United States (SF Bay Area or NYC preferred) Travel expectations 10%-20% for executive meetings and key industry events.

Your responsibilities will include:

Executive Technical Partnership:

• Own the Category-Defining Architecture: Personally own the technical strategy for our lighthouse deals (e.g., an Agency Global Hold Co data consolidation or a AAA Studio infrastructure migration). Ensure these architectures are engineered to survive real-world scale, not just pass a POC.
• The Physics to P&L Narrative: Fluently demonstrate to executive stakeholders how infrastructure decisions (e.g., Data Lake locality, storage tiering) directly impact their business model and operability.

Forensic Requirement Gathering

• Deconstruct the Bottleneck: Go beyond the stated problem to find the technical truth. Translate vague business goals (e.g., “We need lower ad costs”) into precise engineering requirements (e.g., “We need to optimize the inference batch size on L40s to reduce cost-per-token by 30%”).
• Map the Transition: Identify exactly where a customer sits on the curve from Service Bureau to Tech Platform and prescribe the specific infrastructure intervention needed to move them forward.

Ecosystem & ISV Strategy

• Build the Integration Layer: You will identify, court, and technically validate relationships with the most critical ISVs in the media landscape.
• Define the Standard: It is not enough to just “support” these tools; you will define the reference architectures for how they run best on our infrastructure.

Internal Influence

• Chair the M&E Product Summit: You will lead a quarterly summit with Core Engineering leadership. You will use forensic evidence from the field to prioritize and justify the M&E vertical roadmap.

Team Leadership

• Direct our Engineering Team: Ensure our engineering teammates are building the right things at the right time, both in the field as well as high-leverage assets such as scalable quick-start reference architectures (e.g., “Deploying Llama-405B for Ad Copy Creation”)

We expect you to have:

• 10+ years of experience in cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, or distributed systems.
• Executive Presence: Capable of commanding a room of engineers and presenting a layered technical roadmap to a C-Suite.
• Product-Minded: Experience defining a platform strategy, not just executing tickets. You must be comfortable telling a customer “No” when a request creates technical debt, and proposing a better alternative.
• Ambiguity Tolerance: You thrive in environments where requirements are evolving. You do not wait for a roadmap; you build it.
• Entrepreneurial Grit: You view constraints as puzzles to solve, not reasons to stop.
• Forensic Mindset: You are not satisfied with surface-level answers. You dig into the kernel, the logs, and the P&L to find the truth.

AI Infrastructure Expertise

• Mastery of the Stack: You must be an expert in the physics of AI infrastructure. This includes deep, production-grade knowledge of GPU architectures (H100 vs. L40s), Kubernetes orchestration (K8s), high-performance storage parallel file systems (e.g., Lustre, WEKA), and networking constraints (InfiniBand/Ethernet).
• Inference Optimization: You understand the nuances of model serving—batch sizes, quantization, KV caching, and latency tradeoffs—and can architect solutions for both massive throughput and real-time (sub-50ms) demands.

Domain Context: Media & Entertainment

• Industry Fluency: You have experience operating within a part of the M&E sphere and can speak the language of at least two of the following sub-sectors:
• Gaming
• Multimodal Generative Models
• AdTech
• VFX
• Strategic Empathy: The ability to distinguish between customers who need raw bare-metal access and those who need managed endpoints, and the wisdom to prescribe the right path.

Key Employee Benefits:

• Health Insurance: 100% company-paid medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and families.
• 401(k) Plan: Up to 4% company match with immediate vesting.
• Parental Leave: 20 weeks paid for primary caregivers, 12 weeks for secondary caregivers.
• Remote Work Reimbursement: Up to $85/month for mobile and internet.
• Disability & Life Insurance: Company-paid short-term, long-term, and life insurance coverage.

Compensation

We offer competitive salaries, ranging from $295k - $365k OTE (On Target Earnings) + Equity based on your experience.