Remote opportunity at
ToptalChief Technology Officer
Toptal operates a worldwide network of business, design and technology talent that helps companies scale teams on demand. This full-time, remote Chief Technology Officer role drives…
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About This Role
Toptal operates a worldwide network of business, design and technology talent that helps companies scale teams on demand. This full-time, remote Chief Technology Officer role drives execution for product and engineering and places artificial intelligence at the core of the company's products. The CTO owns Toptal's full technical architecture, which the posting says should be built AI-first and guided by agentic engineering practice rather than treated as a side workstream.…
Job Description
Toptal operates a worldwide network of business, design and technology talent that helps companies scale teams on demand. This full-time, remote Chief Technology Officer role drives execution for product and engineering and places artificial intelligence at the core of the company's products. The CTO owns Toptal's full technical architecture, which the posting says should be built AI-first and guided by agentic engineering practice rather than treated as a side workstream.
The CTO defines the AI architecture and engineering practice the company adopts, and owns initiatives that move agents into production. The posting calls for a builder and architect who can design and fine-tune foundation models, engineer strong agent harnesses, and create methods that let engineering teams work faster without losing quality. The CTO sits in design reviews and works hands-on in the codebase, runs the regular meetings that move strategy into production, and keeps engineering from holding back any initiative. Working with Product, the CTO builds infrastructure that makes central business logic available through modular interfaces.
The CTO also decides how teams are organized, scopes and sizes work, plans headcount and sequencing, writes specifications, and defines the standard for every seat, then develops people to meet it. Responsibilities extend to AI quality measurement, evaluation suites, and the cost of engineering and AI work, including inference and token expenses.
Applicants need fifteen or more years of engineering leadership, including considerable time as a CTO or in a VP of Engineering role. The posting expects current, hands-on mastery of AI engineering and proof that agentic systems have run at scale with measured outcomes. Leading a distributed, remote team is a must, and a technical bachelor's degree is required, with a graduate degree strongly favored. Applications and correspondence must be in English.
Responsibilities
- Define the technology direction of the platform and the architecture beneath it, from model selection to guardrails and cost control
- Bring agent-based engineering into talent matching, screening, onboarding, client delivery and back-office operations
- Own evaluations, regression suites and review loops that prove AI quality
- Rework how the platform is built and run so each engineer's output rises through AI-assisted development
- Decide team shape when role boundaries between product, engineering and design have blurred
- Plan resourcing and hiring, sequence the roadmap and turn it into specs
- Govern architecture, reliability, build-or-buy decisions and technical debt
Requirements
- Fifteen-plus years of engineering leadership, including senior technical roles at scale
- Hands-on depth in foundation models, agent architectures, harnesses, retrieval and evaluation
- Proof of agentic systems in production, with results recorded as cost, speed, quality or income
- Skill at proving that a model, prompt or agent update improved results
- Working knowledge of model routing, self-hosted versus hosted costs and cross-provider portability
- Experience modernizing a large existing codebase while the business keeps running
- Leadership of distributed, remote teams across countries
Qualifications
- Technical bachelor's degree required; graduate study a clear plus
- Experience with multi-tenant systems or fast-moving two-sided marketplaces is a major advantage
Core Skills
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers are based only on the employer’s listing; where it doesn’t say, neither do we.
Is this role remote?
Yes. The posting lists the role as remote. Applications and correspondence must be in English, and visa sponsorship is not offered.
What leadership background does the posting ask for?
Fifteen or more years of engineering leadership, including senior work as a CTO or in a VP of Engineering role.
Is the role full-time and what is the pay?
The posting describes a full-time, exempt role. It does not state a salary or pay range.
Does the posting describe a hiring process?
No hiring steps are described. The posting sets requirements and asks that applications be in English.
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