Founding CTO / Principal Engineer, Applied AI

Founding CTO / Principal Engineer, Applied AI Amulet is hiring its first senior technical leader. There is a genuine CTO brief here, but no finished product or established internal engineering team to inherit. The person who joins us will set the architecture, lead delivery and work directly with clients. Depending on the person, that may mean writing code themselves or directing a capable delivery team. What we are building Amulet helps Australian businesses turn AI plans into working systems. The technical challenge is broader than connecting a model to a chat screen. Our systems need to work with the tools a business already uses, respect permissions and data boundaries, require approval for sensitive actions and keep enough evidence for people to understand what happened. We have paying client engagements, an existing codebase and working foundations across model routing, policy controls, approvals, evidence, scheduling and Microsoft 365 workflows. We are still early. Some important platform and integration work is not commercially shipped, and the job is to turn what repeats into reliable product rather than accumulate one-off builds. What you will own - Lead the design, review and shipment of the core product, either through hands-on coding or by directing the delivery team. - Set the architecture for a secure multi-tenant platform, including identity, permissions, approvals, evidence and integrations. - Decide what Amulet should build, buy or extend. - Work directly with clients to understand how their business operates and turn that into bounded technical work. - Turn repeated client needs into reusable product and connector capabilities. - Put practical testing, evaluation, monitoring, incident and release disciplines in place. - Help the Founder make product and commercial commitments that the engineering can support. - Recruit and lead a small engineering team when the work and runway justify it. The first year is about shipping useful systems for real clients and reducing how much custom engineering each deployment needs, with the results shown through tests, operating evidence and client use rather than demos alone. Who this may suit You may be a CTO who can lead technical delivery, a technical founder, a hands-on head of engineering or a staff or principal engineer ready to take broader ownership. We care about the systems you have been accountable for shipping and supporting in production, whether you built them directly or led the team that did. You will need strong backend and architecture skills, sound judgement around identity, permissions, privacy, security and data boundaries, and practical experience with LLM APIs, retrieval, tool use, evaluations and production monitoring. The less glamorous integration work matters too: OAuth, rate limits, retries, idempotency and failure recovery. You must be comfortable talking to business owners, learning how work happens and turning that into a clear product or engineering decision. Our stack includes Python and FastAPI, React and TypeScript, Postgres, cloud infrastructure, OAuth/OIDC, Microsoft 365 integration work and model-provider APIs. You do not need every keyword, but you do need the judgement to learn quickly and make sensible trade-offs. Compensation and equity We will shape the package around the scope of the appointment and the person taking it on. Meaningful equity is available. Founder-level equity is on the table for someone who takes the full Founding CTO brief and accepts the corresponding company-building responsibility. Any equity will be subject to vesting and definitive legal agreements. Location The role is full-time and Sydney-based, with a hybrid working arrangement. You must have the right to work in Australia and be able to work regularly with the team and clients in Sydney. How to apply Apply here, or send me a LinkedIn message or email nayef@amulet.ai with: 1. Two or three things you personally built and shipped, what you owned and what happened after launch. 2. A LinkedIn, GitHub or portfolio link. 3. A short note on why Amulet and this stage of company interest you. 4. Whether you are ready to take the Founding CTO brief or would be better suited to the Principal Engineer appointment. No formal cover letter is required. If your experience does not match every technology listed but you have shipped difficult systems, I still want to hear from you. Nayef Dagher Founder, Amulet AI