Purdue University’s Digital Innovation in Agri-Food Systems Laboratory (DIAL), a part of the Purdue Applied Research Institute (PARI), is a venture studio focused on creating startups that bring digital innovation to our food and agriculture system. In our work, we explore unmet needs in the agri-food value chain, develop potential solutions, and launch new companies to build and bring them to market.
We’ve partnered with High Alpha Innovation to innovate through startup creation. Part strategy consultancy, part venture builder, High Alpha Innovation is a diverse mix of highly-experienced company builders, designers, and strategists who work with corporate and university partners to source, launch, and invest in venture studios and advantaged startups.
Our newest company, currently known as StealthCo, is seeking a Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder to bring to market a “voice-enabled” field sales enablement platform. Targeting the agriculture industry, StealthCo’s platform will serve as the Sales Rep’s personal executive assistant which will allow them to build relationships with their clients more easily and efficiently. Through AI and LLMs, StealthCo will facilitate the capture of the tacit information which minimizes the impact of lost data and relationships during employee turnover. By capturing the key data points following their field visits and providing insights and reports to facilitate long term relationship building, StealthCo will enable field Sales Reps and Sales Management to easily manage their customers and prospects by bringing together several existing technology components in a unique way.
You’ll be supported by the High Alpha Innovation and DIAL Ventures team, who have seen exponential growth across a variety of SaaS platforms in multiple industries and successful exits.
As the CTO and Co-Founder, you will be responsible for building a big, important, and durable business from the ground-up. You will work to build conviction with the market, investors, and early customers as you bring the product to market. You will also set the technology strategy and get the MVP into the hands of early customers. This is a unique opportunity to be a creator, builder, and innovator to build a world-class product from scratch.
What You'll Do:
- Serve as a co-founder and executive partner to the CEO assisting in shaping company strategy and the technical vision while participating in building conviction in the market, with investors, and customers
- Plan and define the architecture of the platform, and lead the creation of the MVP through hands on coding and collaboration with a team of internal or offshore developers
- Collaborate with the CEO on product management strategy; mapping business value and functionality requirements into product features prioritizing to meet milestone deliverables
- Manage the department budget to ensure proper allocation of funds for team growth, execution and R&D
- Actively support the Sales and Customer Support teams with pre and post sales activities including demos and wireframes, stakeholder management, onboarding and technical support
- Develop, build and maintain strong relationships with outside vendors to ensure deadlines are met within budget
- Refine engineering architecture as the product expands to ensure security, scalability and reliability of the platform across all customers
- Build, lead and grow an engineering and product team dedicated to the ongoing advancement of the SaaS product
- Develop and support a culture of continuous improvement and best practices within the Engineering organization
- Develop and maintain a Lean/Agile startup culture maturing with scale, and foster high level of employee motivation, performance, and commitment
- Design and develop clean, scalable, and maintainable code
- Work with modern languages, frameworks, and tools to build a cutting edge platform leveraging the most effective and modern technologies
- Execute continuous deployment practices, including automated testing and continuous integration
- Lead all aspects of technology operations, including DevOps and customer delivery
Requirements
- Demonstrated experience in building SaaS products from scratch and leading high performing engineering teams
- Experience with designing and building software platforms driven by AI/ML models, data processing, and ideally voice transcription and LLM
- Experience with building specialty knowledge databases and models along with integration experience with ERP/CRM systems
- Solid understanding of Semantics and Ontologies as applied to database solutions preferred
- Experience or exposure to solving complex problems in the agricultural field a plus but not required
- 15+ years of professional software development experience, including hands-on software engineering/architecture for commercial technology or technology-enabled services companies
- 5+ years of experience managing or leading a software development team. Experience building and managing a team of both in-house and outsourced software developers
- Familiarity with modern technologies, frameworks and tools used across the entire stack, specifically DBMS, OCR, AI, LLM and NLP, Linux, Android and iOS operating systems
- Systems Design/Architecture experience with excellent understanding of building database systems combining Vector, NoSQL and RDBMS
- Experience in data science or AI/ML with excellent analytical, problem-solving and communication skills
- A customer first mentality, with a strong desire to build relationships with the end user and buyer
- Bachelor’s Degree in computer science or related field, or equivalent experience
- Ability to travel as needed to meet with customers. Likely 20-25%.
Benefits
- Salary plus equity plan
- Medical, Dental & Vision Insurance
- Flexible work location within the United States
- A collaborative, entrepreneurial environment with a proven venture studio playbook
- A highly validated concept and business model hypothesis developed by our team
- Pre-seed funding committed by our university partner sourced from industry companies
- The support of the venture studio and platform services, we surround the startup with world-class expertise in every discipline required to build a market-leading company
High Alpha Innovation and DIAL Ventures is an equal opportunity employer, and we value diversity at our company. We do not just accept diverse backgrounds, we celebrate them. Our company, the work we do, and our partners benefit from the value of a diverse team. No team member's value lies alone in their diversity, and because we value diversity so highly, we reiterate that all hiring and employment decisions are made on merit, performance, competence, and business needs. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.
