CTO / Hacker in Residence

Read the overview on our job board page before you apply: [https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/theacademysf](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/theacademysf) We're looking for a CTO to be the key technical mentor to our students AND build and manage our software systems. You're part founder, part professor, part dean, part software leader. Key Technical Mentor & Educator You have to LOVE tinkering, and be someone who the students will look up to and admire. Ideally you've founded a few companies. Maybe you've written books or given lots of talks. Maybe you're just someone who has a huge list of engineers who have loved learning from you. You should ideally love to play with both hardware and software since the students will do both. You'll buy 3D Printers, Robotic Arms, play with NVIDIA chips, build LLMs from scratch. You'll build a sick robotics, hardware, and software lab through donations and budget of ~$1M to just buy cool shit the students can use. Honestly I think you can get a lot of stuff through donations. You'll also have access to our Founding Partners and whatever technology they are willing to spare (and of course you should be good at convincing them to give you access haha): Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, and Stripe. I expect you will be heavily involved in the curriculum: what does a modern student need to learn about software to be successful in the future? Hardware? AI? The greatest minds in software will come and speak - you may interview them or work with them on their course design. Students will also come to you for advice and you'll spend a lot of time in office hours kind of like a YC General Partner or something. Software Leader This section is short, but not unimportant. We don't honestly know what software we'll need to build because we don't even know what's out there. Eventually we'll need a strong AI-Native Learning Management System and potentially a version of YC Bookface that allows us to manage the projects and creations of hundreds of students. But that's years away and in the meantime, you'll likely build smaller pieces of software like coding challenges for applicants, a leaderboard for hackathons, etc. I cannot fathom all of the ideas we'll have, but I feel it will be quite broad and fun to work on given the audience and the context. Yes, we've reserved a solid equity chunk for the right person. If that's you, find a way to us. The application form for this role is essentially useless.